


The First Avenger

by shestepsintotheriver



Series: Not Another Rewrite [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Awesome Howling Commandos, Captain America: The First Avenger, First Kiss, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Practice Kissing, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers-centric, WWII era, aka who you foolin' son, becoming Captain America, brief Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, first time (ish), it's canon until it's not 'cus i have Issues with certain things, mutual obliviousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-01-16 15:51:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 29
Words: 73,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18524704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shestepsintotheriver/pseuds/shestepsintotheriver
Summary: "Steve Rogers neither begins nor ends with Captain America. Before all that, before the fame and the horror and the loss, Steve is just another hungry kid from Brooklyn. Braver than most—or more bull-headed, depending on who you ask—but pretty average. Discounting the bad heart, the bad lungs, the bad temper, or at least that’s what Bucky always says when Steve does something really stupid, but he'll always add ‘the best guy I ever known’ at the end of the list."The story of the First Avenger with almost all the bits from the movie, then several additions to canon.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi y'all. I didn't mean to make this but in my defense I was goaded and writing de-stresses me, so. The general aim is to re-tell the story of Steve Rogers with a main focus on the characters and probably some changes to the plot. I've not quite worked it all out yet and I don't have a schedule for posting, but let's see what happens. 
> 
> Am I supposed to include a disclaimer? This work is not associated with nor does it benefit from any Marvel and/or Disney trademarks.
> 
> Any mistakes are my own. I will add tags as I go along and possibly change the rating, but this is it for now.

Steve Rogers neither begins nor ends with Captain America. Before all that, before the fame and the horror and the loss, Steve is just another hungry kid from Brooklyn. Braver than most—or more bull-headed, depending on who you ask—but pretty average. Discounting the bad heart, the bad lungs, the bad temper, or at least that’s what Bucky always says when Steve does something really stupid, but he’ll always add ‘the best guy I ever known’ at the end of the list. It’s a long list; Bucky runs through it regularly, switching out items depending on the day, but always ending up with as much heartfelt praise as two Irish-American boys can publicly endure before it becomes too much.

But before America takes note of any of that, Steve is barely noticed at all. He’s always been fairly well-liked around the neighborhood, a polite, upstanding young man, if not exactly a constant fixture that no one familiar with him minds too much. Steve doesn’t know it, but if he were to die tomorrow the pews at church would have to seat more mourners than he would’ve ever thought.

Those who know his name fall into four categories: kind neighbors with a soft spot for the coughing mess that is an excitable ninety-five pound asthmatic (and the memory of sweet Sarah Rogers still etched in their minds); past art teachers impressed with his work in class; bullies that have run afoul of Steve’s sharp tongue and over-developed sense of right and wrong; and Bucky Barnes. Now and then, a nice girl can be bothered to remember him for more than the time it takes for her to lay eyes on Bucky, but that urge is usually gone by the time Steve starts getting short of breath just by talking to her.

He tries to pretend it doesn’t bother him, and sometimes he even succeeds. It’s disheartening enough to be judged and found wanting based on his looks. Uglier men have married, so he’s not too worried about the latter; someone will come along who likes slight, short blonds with blue eyes and inevitable bruises. But the pity that follows the disinterest, the “oh poor dear, are you even going to make it to twenty-five?” that is so obvious in the bemused twist of their lips.

That all used to make Steve so damn angry, but he’s twenty-three years old now and has only almost died six times—seven? Last fall doesn’t really count, he was only bedbound for a week; it was almost just a really bad holiday, he doesn’t at all think of how Bucky gets all tight around the eyes when the weather changes for the worse, no, sir. So what if his lungs have started feeling empty much faster lately, or that his heart can’t quite find a steady beat, or that sometimes he gets so dizzy it feels like he’s going blind as well as half-deaf, and it’s not like he’s got good eyes to begin with. Bucky had _not_ been happy when he’d found out about that, had railed and cursed at Steve for taking him boxing when he was feeling under the weather, and then attempted to smother him with his fussing and kindness when they got home, all the while denying that he was doing so.

But that’s almost half a year ago now, and Steve’ll make it to twenty-four even if it kills him. There are bigger things afoot than his poor health.

“Things” being the War. It’s all anyone can talk about. It’s only recently come to America’s shores, sweeping across the land like a tidal wave of wounded pride and convenient patriotism in the face of Japanese encroachment. Steve’s kept his eye on the war efforts from before there even _were_ any war efforts to speak of, at least on this side of the world. He was listening in on the radio when President Roosevelt declared their continued commitment to neutrality, he read all about it when France fell to the Nazis, and he shook with determination when America finally erupted after Pearl Harbor. The world has been on fire for so long, but now they’re finally doing something.

Steve had had a lot to say on the hypocrisy of their previous preference for Isolationism, but he’s said most of it behind closed doors. A lot of people don’t take too kindly to that sort of talk, but Bucky had listened with pursed lips and shrewd eyes.

“I suppose you’ll wanna join up, huh, Stevie?” he’d said, an air of barely-banked defeat about him. “Well, I ain’t lettin’ you go in half-cocked.”

And so, he’d tried to whip Steve into shape before they tried their hand at enlisting. Steve likes to think that he’s gotten a little more stamina, a little more accuracy behind his punches, but you wouldn’t know it by the way Bucky acts. You’d almost think Steve was actively dying on him, all that strictness. That only happened… four times? Maybe five—six? All those times blur in his mind, the times he’s known Bucky and the times he’s been so sick Father O’Reilly has had to come say the last rites at his bedside. In Steve’s mind, Bucky is in every memory, even if he knows that that can’t be true.

In the end, they’d both had to admit that the training hadn’t done much. Bucky hadn’t been formally trained, and he didn’t know how to teach Steve anything but the moves that worked for himself. It was an ill-suited match that they both nonetheless stubbornly committed to for a few weeks. Steve had enlisted anyway, marching down to the recruitment office side by side with Bucky, handed over his identification and sat through a medical exam that was somehow more awkward and intrusive than any he’d ever had before. He’d barely buttoned up his shirt before being gently booted from the room. Bucky… well, that was another story, wasn’t it. Seemed like they’d taken just one look at him and that was it, _off you go, recruit_.  

But Bucky had always been everybody’s idea of perfection, even when they were kids. Back then, Steve had orbited him like the sun, and curiously, Bucky had done the same with him. In their teens, when girls started being distracting and Steve started being distract _ed_ , Bucky had shot up like a weed, still a poor, beanpole boy from one of the rougher neighborhoods in Brooklyn, but so bright and charming, all the hallmarks of beauty starting to show on his face and in his body. Add to that a sudden slight sense of vanity and bodily consciousness, and Bucky had started cleaning up real nice—even forcing Steve into making an effort whenever they’d gone out dancing. And then the army took Bucky, and when he came back from bootcamp there was nothing left of the boy Steve had known all his life. In the place of busted knuckles and carefully mended shirts there was a young man fit to rival Gary Cooper any day. For a brief, shameful moment Steve had expected Bucky to walk out of his life, but Bucky had just smiled like he did when they were kids and dragged Steve out on the town with him.

That was three months ago. Steve hasn’t seen him since, not even for Becca Barnes’ wedding, though a letter and a handsome, too-expensive gift arrived on the day of the ceremony. Bucky’s been away for extra training, his commanding officers quickly catching onto the fierceness and work-horse mentality that had enabled Bucky to keep his and Steve’s heads above water until now. It’s no wonder the army wanted him, no wonder _anyone_ wants him. Sometimes, Steve feels Bucky slipping away, like he’s already across the sea and rooted in the mud and dirt of some European country with bombs and blood and bullets all around him. On those days, Steve will take out Bucky’s old letters and read them like gospel.

_Never knew coffee could taste this bad_ , he’ll read, breathing out a puff of air that could only pray to be a chuckle, _it makes us all cranky._ Another says, _tell me you didn’t go running your mouth at Connor Johnson again, I swear, Stevie, you attract more trouble every year, it shouldn’t be possible¸_ and another will say _you’d think they’d give us proper damn socks in the army, wouldn’t you, Stevie?_ and another and another and another.

Sometimes, some stray phrase from one of the letters will pop into Steve’s head as he’s working. His work is nothing fancy, painting a shop sign if he’s lucky, doing odd jobs around the neighborhood if he’s not. He’ll choke with how much he misses Bucky’s presence in their tiny apartment, flush hot with shame and jealousy at how much he wishes he was there with him, how much he wishes he could _be_ him. Or, not _be_ Bucky, exactly, but be _like_ him. Tall, strong, charming. Unlikely to be mistaken for being near-death just because the stairs are steep and the air is heavy. They’d be a matching set, two Irish boys from Brooklyn with nothing on their backs but determination and the willingness to do absolutely anything for one another, bickering like children as they go along.

But more than the desire to be by Bucky’s side, Steve longs to do the right thing, to be useful. He’s always itched to do more, _be_ more than this body allows him to be, to not be a burden. He’s ignored his aching lungs and ailing heart, yelled himself hoarse and gotten back on his feet after being knocked down time and time again, stood up when no one else could or would. People think he’s being selfless—or a damn nuisance—and sometimes he is. But most times, it’s just a matter of recognizing himself in other downtrodden people, of seeing their pain and fear and knowing it intimately, even when he was too young to be afraid of death and suffering. By this point, no one knows the back alleys of Brooklyn like he does, having been acquainted with their brick walls and pavement too many times to count. There’d be no one scrappier than him in the army, he’s sure of that. Except maybe Bucky, who’d been down those same alleyways.

Such statements fall on deaf ears in recruitment offices, though. It’s obvious that today will be no different, Steve can read it in the furrow between the officer’s brows and the displeased thinning of his lips. It’s the fifth time he’s tried—even bringing up his father’s death and emphasizing that though his ma’s died of tuberculosis, Steve himself had never suffered from it despite his many varied illnesses—surely that’s a sign of resilience! The recruitment officer raises a disbelieving brow, glancing at Steve’s papers and the doctor’s notes, too worn out to be patient with him. 

“Give me a chance,” Steve says, trying to be firm while his voice shakes. “I’m more capable than I look.”

The officer stamps his papers with a bold, black 4F.

The worst part is walking out through the masses of tall, brawny boys barely older than Steve himself, boys who’ll go to war for the country, go where Steve can’t, do what needs to be done. It’s moments such as these that make him think _I’m dying anyway—why can’t I die for something?_ Bucky would slap him upside the head for thinking like that. Hell, Steve would, too, will berate himself in the late hours of the night and grit his teeth against the anger and the disappointment and try again tomorrow. There’re a few offices that he hasn’t tried yet.

He emerges into the light, warm spring air of New York City in April. America has been at war for just about five months and Bucky’s shipping out tomorrow. His last letter had been vague on the details, saying only that he’d been promoted and would be getting on a boat by morning. He’s come home today for a last goodbye; Steve’s meeting him in their neighborhood later, having insisted that Bucky first spend some time with his folks and sisters. Steve’s not the only one being left behind, even if he’ll be the most alone. Besides, if he gets his way, he’ll be with Bucky soon enough, even if he has to swim to Europe.

Feeling restless and despondent, he heads to the movie theater in the hopes of getting out of his own head for a while. There’s a showing for newsreels and cartoons, perfect for waiting around. He finds a seat in the middle of one of the backrows, inching past older men and their respective wives with their heads held high and tears held back. They’ve probably sent their sons to war, maybe their daughters, too. God knows the front needs them all.

A few rows ahead he spots Arnie Roth sitting with Sammy Bernstein. The two men laugh quietly, not attracting attention amongst the other raucous people, sitting a respective ways apart, not touching. It’s only because Steve knows about them that he even knows how to spot the glint of fondness in their eyes, the familiarity and ease they have with one another. It’d been Bucky who’d told him, arriving home one day from the shipyard with a puzzled expression on his face and asked “did ya know Arnie had a sweetheart?”

Steve hadn’t known. He’d known Arnie was queer—though it wasn’t talked about at polite gatherings, Bucky and he had grown up in Red Hook. If you looked outside, you’d seen more than husbands and wives chastely holding hands. They’d met Arnie and Sammy soon after, not for socializing or anything, just accidentally. Sammy’s nice; Steve likes him, likes him even better for being good to Arnie whom Steve and Bucky went to school with. But even if Steve hadn’t known about them, he would’ve guessed. Not because they were obvious. Just. He knew the look of restrained adoration, the cautious peek from under lowered lashes when the other wasn’t looking, the nervous and excited twitch in his fingers whenever he looked at—Steve had known.

He looks away now, not wanting to be rude or draw unwanted attention. It’s no one’s business. The theater has slowly filled with people and noise, the latter not even petering out when the lights go down, and the screen lights up. Steve loves the movies; it’s a great way to be with other people without having to be actively social, something that doesn’t allow for him to put his foot in his mouth or step on any toes.

He leans back and tries to shut out his thoughts for a little while.

Which of course means that they’re barely ten minutes through the show before a newsreel full of war footage run across the screen. It’s not the reel itself; if Steve got offended by every last, little reminder of the war, he would have to bury himself in a field somewhere in Indiana—and even then, some farmer talk about how his sons have gone off to the front. It’s not even the slight boredom certain individuals exude, though privately he thinks they ought to be more worried and less bored; people are dying, and they’re hiding yawns? He just grits his teeth.

No, what really bothers him—and everybody else, going by the gasps and clutched collars, no one here is rich enough for pearls—is the loud-mouthed fool up front. His first insult startles everyone: “Play the cartoon already!” Steve’s hands clench. “I didn’t pay to watch this shit!”

Steve snaps. He can’t help himself. “Hey, wanna show some respect and _shut up?_ ” He feels vindicated for just a few seconds before the loudmouth rises to his feet and looks back at him; in the moments before eye-contact, a few women nod approvingly at him and a few men even look shamefaced that short, scraggly Steve Rogers has got more guts than they do. But then the man is up and up and up, and Steve curses his luck.

They end up in the alley behind the theater—Steve’s been here before, got beat up here just a few months ago for cussing out a group of fellas catcalling some girls that had looked much too young for them. He’d gotten a fat lip and two blue eyes, but miraculously his nose hadn’t been broken. He’s not quite sure there’d have been a difference, though; it’s already beaky, it’s not like it could be worse. He’s been here a lot of times, actually; the theater’s right between his and Bucky’s apartment and the Barnes’ place.

This guy is tall and built and a lot more coordinated than the group of men who’d all been past tipsy and well into soused. Also, they hadn’t even been angry, just annoyed. This guy is pissed off; his first punch knocks Steve clean across the alley, getting up close and personal with the brick wall before being pulled back for another hit and taking a dive into some trash. Thankfully, it’s mostly from the concessions stand, so it’s popcorn and ticket stubs and nothing stickier or more disgusting—though some of those popcorn do smell moldy.

Stumbling to his feet, Steve sniffs back the warm, metallic blood trickling from his nose, shakes out his arms, definitely doesn’t wobble, and faces the guy. “I can do this all day.” In the split second of incredulity, Steve darts a jab at the guy’s face, fist clenched like Bucky taught him. It connects with a thwack.

Grunting angrily, the guy takes another swing, his entire body telegraphing the hit before it lands. Steve isn’t fast enough to duck, though, vision flickering from that last punch. He takes a metal trashcan down with him this time, scrambles around to get back up and not back down. He almost stumbles on the lid, sending it skittering across the dirty ground; he dives after it and holds it in front of himself as if it were a shield.

“Stay the fuck down,” the guy growls at him, pulling back his arm again. Steve closes his eyes.

The hit never lands; instead there’s a crack and a high-pitched shout.

“Steve, you okay?”

Steve winces but relaxes before he even puts a name to the familiar voice. “I’m fine, Buck.”

When he opens his eyes, there’s a moment of disconnect. Gone is the soldier boy he’d only just gotten used to, the man whose cheeks had still been round with lingering boyhood fat, whose smile had still been roguish with mischief. Only the voice and the presence are the same, the latter merely distilled and poured into military dress greens and a jauntily cocked hat.

Light, gray-blue eyes check Steve over, steely with anger. Satisfied that he isn’t worse off, Bucky wrests the guy away, arm twisted behind his back at a severely uncomfortable-looking angle. The move’s military, authoritarian in a way Bucky’s never been before—but the swift, sharp kick to the guy’s backside is a remnant of a simpler time. Bucky’s always been a mean fighter when it comes to protecting Steve.

They watch the guy stumble from the alley, not even darting a glance back. The sounds of the city filter back in, as does the smell of the dirty alley, piss and popcorn and sewage water.

“I had him on the ropes.” Bucky makes a displeased face, nose scrunching and eyes squinting. “ _What_?” Steve growls, dropping the trashcan lid back where it belongs.

Bucky runs his tongue over his teeth, sucking back air in irritation before visibly letting the worst of his ire go. “Really, Steve? Didn’t you just get beat up in this exact alley? And what’s this?” He darts forward, snatching Steve’s rejection papers from the ground where they’ve fallen during the fight, his tone taking on a disgusted air that only native New Yorkers can get down pat, “you’re from _Paramus_ , Steve? You’re desperate enough to be from _New Jersey_?”

Angry that Bucky got to see those, angry at himself for not having stowed them in a safer place than his jacket pocket, Steve dusts himself off with as much dignity as he can muster. Which is quite a lot; being beat up every other week affords you practice with such things.

Meanwhile, Bucky’s getting a good steam going. “What are you gonna do if they find out? Fight your way outta the office? Play hide-and-seek all over Brooklyn with the law? What are you gonna do if they catch you? You _will not_ do well in prison, Steve, I’m pretty sure that Joe Keefe has told them all about you by now, he’s probably got important _friends_ —"

“Joe Keefe ain’t in the mob, Bucky.”

“ _He could be, Steve!_ ”

Steve rolls his eyes. The glint of metal on Bucky’s uniform catches in the afternoon light. It sends a lump into Steve’s throat, derailing the pique and embarrassment. “You say goodbye to your folks?”

Bucky’s hand twitches toward the insignias on his breast and shoulders, as if wanting to erase the three chevrons. He forces the gesture down and instead straightens to parade rest, head titled back in something that would be defiance if it weren’t for the mingled sadness and pride in his eyes. “Sergeant James Barnes of the 107th.” They both pretend the mention of Steve’s father’s old unit doesn’t pierce Steve like a knife. “Shipping out for London first thing in the morning.”

An awkward silence descends. Steve and Bucky both refuse to be the first to look away, instead staring each other down; Bucky like he expects Steve to be angry, Steve just waiting for the other shoe to drop. But there is no other shoe. Bucky’s leaving. He’s leaving and leaving and leaving. There is no other shoe.

Finally, Bucky looks away and Steve can breathe again.

“’Spose you wanna go dancing now?” Steve mumbles towards the ground as if that will stop Bucky from hearing him. He doesn’t mean _dancing,_ or at least not _just_ dancing; he doesn’t need to elaborate further.

Bucky shifts his weight. “Nah. But I do wanna go somewhere. Come on, we’ll get ya cleaned up a bit.” He pulls Steve in with the crook of his elbow, arm settling around Steve’s shoulders with easy familiarity. Bucky feels bigger somehow, taller, sharper, as if the four months of bootcamp and extra training has aged and changed him more than the twenty years Steve has known him. What’ll the war do to him, at this speed? Will there be anything left of Bucky Barnes when he comes home?

Comforted by his presence, Steve dispels the unease in his gut and grins up at Bucky with the taste of blood still on his tongue. “Where we goin’ then?”

Bucky bites his lower lip in a smile and gestures toward a poster board high above them; it’s done up in a stylish font and colors that even Steve can surmise as bold despite being largely colorblind. “The future.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve and Bucky go to the World Expo, have an argument, and Steve meets Dr. Erskine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still sticking fairly close to the movie. For now, just assume I'm following canon until I'm not (helpful, I know).

The World Exposition of Tomorrow is held out in Flushing Meadows, so it takes them quite a while to get there even by train. Their carriage is packed, people standing as far apart as possible and minding their own business. Steve and Bucky get more than a few looks because of the way Bucky looks in his uniform. Despite knowing that all eyes will skip right over him, the attention makes Steve uncomfortable, makes him shrink away from standing too close to Bucky, the image of Arnie and Sammy laughing together flashing in his mind.

“We gotta go see the Modern Marvels of Tomorrow exhibit,” Bucky says as they’re disembarking. “Howard Stark is presenting some new invention of his, I gotta know where the world’s going while I’m gone. I read that it’s all about every-day inventions, not just weapons, you know? He’s making sure we got something to come back to.”

Steve lets Bucky’s admiration and excitement wash over him. It’s not the first time he’s heard Bucky talk about science and technology like this—isn’t even the first time he’s heard him talk about Howard Stark like this. Bucky has always been smart, always had a head for math and natural sciences, had begged his ma to tell him everything about the Scopes Monkey trial when he was just eight years old. The fact that he loves learning is the key reason why Winnie Barnes and Bucky had had a row to match any Steve’s ever seen when Bucky dropped out of high school after just one year. Bucky doesn’t talk about it, not even with Steve. It’s one of those sensitive subjects, like Steve’s temper, Bucky’s protectiveness, Steve’s stubbornness. There are a lot of things they don’t talk about.

But Howard Stark has a special place in Bucky’s mind. Maybe Bucky sees an equal in Howard, someone who came from nothing, ruthlessly fought his way to everything, and is now revolutionizing warfare and technology as they know it. Bucky would never be vain enough to call them intellectual equals, but Steve’s sure that if Bucky hadn’t stayed in Brooklyn to care for his family, hadn’t dropped everything and moved in with Steve when Sarah Rogers passed, if he had stayed in school and spent less time chasing after Steve’s endless fights, Bucky would mostly likely have had a place in Howard Stark’s employ.

But they don’t talk about that.

Instead, Steve lets Bucky drag him from one exhibit to another, listens as he excitedly  prattles on about this doodad or that. It’s not that Steve has no interest; quite the contrary. It’s just that a lot of the highly technological things go over his head and as long as it works, Steve isn’t too concerned with _how_ it works. Besides, he can’t be expected to focus on a new type of ice-box when Bucky is leaving tomorrow. So he drinks the extravagant malt-shake and accepts the bag of salted peanuts that Bucky insists on buying from a vendor, citing his newly raised wages. He lets Bucky spruce him up before pushing him into a photo booth, flattening Steve’s hair with the comb Bucky keeps in his breast pocket, and wiping the last trace of blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

There’s not a lot of room in the booth; their elbows knock, and their legs press together from thigh to ankles, but Bucky’s laughing and that’s enough. “Don’t look too grim now, Stevie, I’ll be bringing one a’these with me to the front, would hate to tell the other fellas that my best friend couldn’t even smile for me on my last day.” Steve pinches Bucky’s hand and lets his laughter ring out loud and bright.

They stumble from the booth, winded with joy and pushing at one another like children. Bucky pulls the photo strip from the slot and wastes no time making fun of them both. “God, Stevie, you’d think a mug like that would bring all the girls running, wouldn’t ya? They’ll all be seeing what’s been right in front of them when us brutes are gone, huh?” Steve scoffs and mocks the way that Bucky has his all scrunched up the photos, head turned towards Steve and his face glowing with happiness.

“Now don’t be mad,” Bucky says a few minutes later as they turn towards the Modern Marvels exhibit.

Steve’s heart sinks and he knows what’s about to come. “Who is it?”

“It’s just Connie, Becca’s friend, you know, and her cousin Bonnie, she’s visiting from outta state, and Becca told her we’d be heading this way and I couldn’t just ban them from going, and Connie’s always said that Bonnie’s real nice—”

“Their names are Connie and Bonnie? That’s almost as dumb as Becca and Bucky.”

“Come on, Stevie, it’s just for a few hours, we won’t even be home too late, I swear it.”

Steve heaves a sigh gusty enough to make his lungs ache. “What’d you tell her about me?”

Bucky lights up. “Only the good stuff.”

The girls are waiting for them at the exhibit entrance. Connie’s all done up in a pretty, pale dress and embroidered jacket, dark, curly hair pulled back from her face. Her cousin is just as pretty in a darker, patterned dress, her long blond hair twisted into victory curls. Their eyes fall on Bucky first, as is usual, and light right up. Steve can sympathize. Bucky’s all jawline and cheekbones now, light, lovely eyes and roguish charm, and in his dress greens he’s the very picture of masculinity.

Their reaction to Steve is… less encouraging. Connie doesn’t react much; she knows what Steve looks like after all, though seeing him so starkly different next to Bucky, skin slowly starting to show bruising from his fight, seems to surprise even her. But Bonnie looks like she’s had her dearest wish snatched right out of her hands; she takes Steve in, all five feet four inches of him, jacket mussed from getting up close and personal with the ground, rumpled pants and pale skin and dark bruises blooming. It’s not the best first impression; Steve will admit that much. But the pinched expression of displeasure is a bit of an overreaction.

Bucky notices it, too, eyes bouncing back and forth between them before adopting a smile that’s only visibly strained to those who know him like Steve does, and leads them all into the exhibition area. _Welcome to the Modern Marvels Pavilion and the World of Tomorrow! A greater world. A better world!_ a recording announces every few minutes. The excitement in the exhibit is palpable, stifling as summer heat and candy floss at Coney Island.

A smartly dressed dame announces Howard Stark on the stage, her red lips pulled back to show all her pearly whites. The crowd goes wild when the man himself enters the stage, almost as pretty as the announcer herself. Women scream their love at him, and men cheer when he dips the announcer in a brief, heated kiss that makes her grin like a cat. He’s a handsome man, dark hair and dark eyes, clothed in an immaculate suit. He makes Steve’s fingers itch for his sketchpad, makes him want to capture the slyness and over-blown charm that simply oozes from Stark’s every breath and move and word.

“ _Ladies and gentlemen, what if I told you that in just a few short years_ ,” Stark proclaims, “ _your automobile won’t even have to touch the ground at all!_ ” Behind him, a group of scantily clad showgirls have started taking the wheels off an expensive car. When they step back, hips cocked in contrapposto and smiling widely, the car starts up with a hum. Steve offers Bonnie some of the peanuts; she frowns and scoots closer to Bucky and Connie. “ _With Stark Robotic Reversion Technology, you’ll be able to do just that._ ”

Despite standing on Steve’s bad side, Bucky’s amazed oath is still audible as the car engine thrums even louder. The car slowly rises to hover a foot or so above the floor. Even Steve’s heart skips a beat in excitement, and it’s not even because of the arrythmia. His shortness of breath, however, is definitely because of the thickness of the crowd. He has to get out, get some air.   

As sensing the perfect time to be dramatic, the car crashes to the stage floor after just a few seconds in the air, the robotic engine whining under the strain. A few spare parts and some cogs and gears come loose, scattering all over and making the showgirls and Stark himself jump out of the way. Rather than being embarrassed, Stark merely grins and shrugs, “ _I did say a few years, didn’t I?_ ” He skips out as the crowd laughs and applauds.

*

There’s a recruitment office right outside the show grounds. A severe Uncle Sam points at you from his poster, encouraging all who see him to enlist. A number of other posters decorate the walls inside; a pilot who says _You give us the “fire”, we’ll give ‘em hell!,_ a giant star-shaped stamp descending on a swastika reading _Stamp out the Axis!,_ and a soldier blowing his bugle in front of the waving American flag, proclaiming _These colors won’t run!_ with the subtitle _Remember Pearl Harbor._

Across from the posters, there’s a large mural-and-mirror installation of a soldier; he’s saluting the onlookers, and his face has been replaced by a round mirror. A couple is playing around in front of it, the man stepping up to emerge as the soldier in the mirror, the girl pulling him away with teasing remarks. When Steve steps up, his forehead barely clears the soldier’s collar. All soldiers can’t be tall, can they? Steve’s only a couple inches below the national average, why do all soldier seem to be 6 feet or above?

A hand snakes around his shoulder, shaking him from his musings. “Come on, Stevie. We’ll take the girls dancing, just show them a good time, and then head home in an hour or two.”

Steve can’t bear to look at Bucky just then, wouldn’t be able to stand the gentle pity that’s sure to be present in his face. He can handle affectionate insults and angry fussing, but he never did cope well with sympathy, and he has no doubt Bucky had noticed exactly how little Bonnie had enjoyed Steve’s company. “You go ahead. I’ll catch up if I change my mind.”

The very air bristles with Bucky’s disappointment. He waves his arms around the office. “You’re really gonna do this again?”

“It’s a fair; I’m gonna try my luck.”

“As who? Steve from _Ohio_? They’ll catch you—or worse! They’ll actually take you!”

Steve bites back the instinctive spite, the anger at being doubted. Bucky doesn’t see him as weak, he knows that. But he’s long used to dealing with the consequences of Steve’s actions, has often had to do so with his fists. “You know I’m worth just as much—”

“That’s not the question! This isn’t a back alley, Steve! It’s war! You’re not gonna be able to fight your way out of it with words and sheer, dumb luck!”

“I know! I know what I’m signing up for, you don’t have to tell me.”

“You have the opportunity to stay, there are so many important jobs right here, Stevie, why do you gotta fight to feel worthy—”

“What am I gonna do, Buck? Collect scrap metal—”

“Yes! Yes, why not!”

“—dragging my little red wagon like a kid half my age—”

“ _Why not?_ It’d keep you safer.”

“—I’m not gonna sit in a factory and—”

“Steve, please listen—”

“Bucky!” he finally exhales, tired and sad and angry at the jealousy burning in his veins. He should be by Bucky’s side. It’s where he belongs. It’s what’s _right_. “Come _on_! There are men laying down their lives, I got no right to do any less than them. This isn’t about me, why don’t you understand?”

“I understand, Steve, I understand better than anyone.” He looks fit to tear his hair out. “Don’t lie to me. We don’t do that to each other.”

From outside, Connie’s voice rings out, calling on Bucky to go dancing with them. She and Bonnie stand side by side, a matching set in the way Steve wishes he and Bucky could be; equals, dark and light, a united front. He’d thought he’d always had to latter two, at least, but it’s all slipping away like sand between his fingers.

Bucky waves at them, calling out reassurances. He looks at Steve, light eyes heavy with regret. “You sure you aren’t coming? No? Fine. I won’t be home too late. Don’t do anything stupid ‘til I get back.”

“How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you,” Steve jabs back, softening the rebuke with a smile.

Bucky’s lips pull tight like he’s fighting laughter. “You’re a punk,” he says, then darts in for a hug.

“Jerk.” Steve clutches back just as tightly, for once banishing the hot flash of shameful desire to linger and ignoring the fact that anyone could look at them and see his heart written all over his face. It can be excused, the clinginess and desperation. Bucky’s leaving tomorrow; already he’s slipping away. If Steve hopes that dancing is all that Bucky will do with the girls tonight, that’s between him and God.

*

There aren’t a lot of people in the recruitment office this late, especially not with the fair still open. Steve is shown into a curtained-off examination room and attended by a young doctor immediately. He’s unbuttoning his shirt when a nurse discreetly arrives to whisper something intelligible to the doctor, her face giving nothing away. The doctor gets to his feet and bids Steve wait, giving him a steely look when Steve sits up in alarm.

He sinks back down, unease swimming in his gut. The room smells clean and stale, that special hospital smell that somehow gets translated to stringent cleaning fluids and low-level illnesses, neither overpowering the other, but always battling for dominance. Neither is a particularly pleasant smell.

Behind him, there a sign on the wall warning against lying on your enlistment form. _Shit._

Before Steve can bolt, an MP sweeps the curtain aside and steps inside. He’s followed by a balding, kind-looking man in a doctor’s coat. The latter smiles and sends the MP away, which at least calms Steve’s nerves somewhat. Maybe he’ll get off with a warning; he’s already working up an excuse, or rather a lie, an _I’ll never lie on my enlistment form again, I swear!_

“So,” the man says, taking a seat. “I am Dr. Abraham Erskine. I represent the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Steve Rogers, yes?” He has a soft, German accent and a patient demeanor. He waits for Steve to acknowledge his name before continuing. “You want to go overseas. Kill some Nazis.”

“Um,” Steve stutters. Dr. Erskine doesn’t react, just looks through Steve’s file. “Excuse me. Um. But where are you from again?”

“The Strategic Scientific Reserve. Other than that? Queens. 73rd Street and Utopia Parkway. Before that: Germany. Is that a problem?” Shrewd eyes watch him over half-moon glasses. Steve hurriedly shakes his head. “Hm. Where are _you_ from, Mr. Rogers? New Haven? Paramus? Five different exams in five different cities.”

_Shit._ “That might not be the right file.” _Shit._

Dr. Erskine waves a hand. “Oh, no, it’s not the exams I’m interested in, it’s the five tries. But you didn’t answer my question: do you want to kill Nazis?”

Steve’s shallow breaths stick in his throat. His palms are sweaty. “Is this a test?” Dr. Erskine inclines his head. Steve takes a steadying breath. “I don’t wanna kill anyone. I don’t like bullies—I don’t care where they’re from.”

Dr. Erskine’s face is inscrutable, but Steve tries to tell himself that he sees satisfaction hovering at the corners of Erskine’s lips, like a secret smile between friends. He nods, then shrugs. “Well, there are already so many big men fighting this war.” He turns away, picking up Steve’s enlistment form. It rustles in his hands. “Maybe that we need now is the little guy, huh? I can offer you a chance— _only_ a chance. Congratulations, soldier. We leave tomorrow.”

Steve accepts his forms with shaking hands and a pounding heart. This time, they’re stamped with a 1A: _accepted_.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve and Bucky say goodbye and definitely do not cry about it, and Steve starts bootcamp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh look, an original scene. also, i'm gonna start deviating a little bit from canon after this.

Steve doesn’t tell Bucky. They talk before bed and he doesn’t tell him; they wake up in the same room and he doesn’t tell him; he follows him to the harbor and hugs him goodbye and he doesn’t tell him. Now that he’s actually going, he just can’t tell Bucky; not because he doesn’t want to, but because he suspects that Bucky won’t take it well. While Bucky had dragged him to the gym and gotten him patched up for the first enlistment attempt, there’d been a sense of relief in the way Bucky had talked about the future since Steve was first rejected, making no attempt to hide just how much he likes the idea of coming back home to Steve and his family. That they’re staying behind is the one bright spot in Bucky’s mind, and it’s not like Steve can blame him. In a way, he wishes that Bucky couldn’t go either. But that’s a selfish desire.

He lets Bucky hug him one last time and joke about not winning the war before Steve can get there. Even that little jest makes Steve’s chest tight and his eyes blurry. Bucky chuckles and squeezes his wrist, body turned towards Steve even as he says goodbye to his family. Steve’s last sight of his best friend is a blurry, waving silhouette by the ship’s railing. He stands with the Barneses until the ship slips into the bay proper, then makes his excuses and heads home to pack.

*

On the bus to Camp Lehigh, Steve sits alone. There are maybe eight or nine other men on the bus; they’re roughhousing as if they’ve known each other all their lives, not just the few minutes since they stepped onto the bus. It’s not that Steve doesn’t want to join them; it’s that one of them, a blond bully with a square jaw, has made it very clear that that is _not_ going to happen. Steve is not going to risk his one shot at the army by getting into a fight _before_ stepping a single toe into camp.

Instead he doses in fits and starts and tries not to get carsick as the bus weaves in and out of traffic on its way to Jersey. Slipping into dreams, he half remembers the night before.

Bucky had come home early, just like he’d said he would. Steve was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing by a light, a picture of Bucky in his uniform. He’s always drawn portraits of the Barneses; this one will go to Winifred and George. It’ll be Steve’s last gift to them, one of the last things he’ll ever do for them while they’re still alive.

Bucky had smelled of sweat, cologne, and a little bit of cheap liqueur.

“Hey, Stevie,” he’d slurred happily, eyes heavy-lidded in the manner of the pleasantly tipsy. “You didn’t have to wait up for me.” He’d glanced at the drawing and his mouth pulled into a dopey smirk. “That’s me.”

“You have real good eyes, Buck, I can see why they’d want you in the army.” Still, the praise had warmed his cheeks. Bucky’s never been shy with his admiration. “The girls get home okay, or...?” _Did you do more than dancing_? Bucky had said they wouldn’t do anything else, but Bucky’s tactile and loves attention. He’s not that hard to sway.

“Yeah, they’re good girls,” Bucky had said like he’d never gone home with good girls. Like he and Bucky weren’t good boys, like Steve didn’t get his first and only kiss from a good girl who’d been temporarily persuaded by his blue eyes to forget about the pneumonia surely waiting for him just around the corner. They’re all good girls and boys until something better comes along. “Shoulda gone with us, Stevie, we went to that dancehall you don’t mind too much, the one with the crazy wallpaper, and we waltzed, you like that, Stevie, I know you can dance like that.”

“Only ‘cause you taught me, and I can’t lead.”

“Don’t matter,” Bucky’d mumbled sleepily, coming to sit by Steve and letting his head—cap and all—fall onto Steve’s shoulder, not entirely comfortable for any of them. Up close, he’d smelled entirely of warmth and home and memories. They’ve always been this close; it’s the only reason why Steve’s always known the exact shape of Bucky’s face, despite his poor eyesight. This close, the little things are easily distinguished, like the eye-crinkles, the odd freckle, the chin cleft.

“Let’s get you to bed, Buck. Come on, don’t you make me drag you.”

They’d gone to bed in silence, almost as if the easy camaraderie had been but a frail cloth pulled over reality. In the darkness of their small room, every sound and smell were reminders that it would all end in the morning. The floorboards in the hallway creaked, and they’d remembered that their footsteps would be but ghostly echoes come summer; one of their neighbors coughed in the room above, and they’d breathed deeply as if to retain the Brooklyn air in their lungs forever.

Steve had rolled over on his side, twisting toward Bucky’s bed, eyes searching in the shadows. Bucky had been turning over and over, fussy as a child, nervous but unwilling to voice it. The amicable drunkenness from the kitchen had all but sobered up.

“Hey, Buck?”

“Yeah?” Bucky’d whispered quickly, as if he’d only been waiting for Steve to talk.

“It’s pretty warm tonight, and—” _it’s your last night and my last night and our last night and–_ “d’you wanna camp out in the living room?”

Beneath the blanket roof of their fort, Steve had felt more at ease. Tomorrow hadn’t feel quite so imminent or threatening, and the wild grin on Bucky’s face had grown so wide it seemed to reshape the space between them, a sense of childhood wonder resurrecting itself to keep them safe.

In the quiet, close space there had been less things to ponder. As kids they used to talk about everything, before shame and propriety had made its way into their vocabulary, until raw emotion got stuck in their throats and only found its way into the open when there was no chance of seeing the other’s reaction to the clumsy, stumbling stuttering.

Feeling brave, Steve’d inched his fingers across their lumpy couch cushions, careful not to accidentally poke Bucky anywhere awkward.

Bucky’s hands had been rough and calloused and devastatingly gentle as if Bucky, too, was trembling with fragility inside. Steve had twined their fingers together, thumb sweeping over the back of Bucky’s hand once, twice. It’s not enough and it’s too much. Tears had burned behind his eyelids, but he couldn’t risk blinking, or he might have missed something. If their breaths had been a little too heavy with quenched sobs, none of them had said a word. They’d pretended that Bucky had just needed to clear his throat before settling down to sleep, and that Steve’s lungs were just acting up again.

Bucky was leaving. Bucky is gone.

And now Steve is on his way.

*

Camp Lehigh is an SSR compound around two hours from Manhattan, further north than Steve’s ever been and they’re still only in goddamn New Jersey. The recruits are made to change into army fatigues in the barracks, to stash their things away beneath their respective beds, and then they’re off into the sunshine.

Steve’s helmet is too big. It keeps sliding down his forehead, but there hadn’t been a smaller one. They’re lined up in an _almost_ straight line, curious and sore from the bus ride. The camp isn’t particularly large, and there aren’t all that many people either. It’s not that it’s devoid of life; it’s quite busy, but a lot of the personnel seem to be either officers or civilians, not recruits like themselves, though a few scattered groups of soldiers. Some privates first-class, a few specialists; Steve isn’t close enough to distinguish their exact insignia. The barracks and depots are squat, ugly, brick buildings, and the heat visibly rises from every roof.

“Recruits! _Attention_!” snaps a voice like a whip, startling Steve and his fellow recruits into a slightly more proper line. A regal dame a few inches taller than Steve marches into view. She has a direct, unflinching gaze and wears immaculate red lipstick. Steve has an instant, instinctive sort of respect for her. “Gentlemen, I’m Agent Carter. I supervise all operations for this division.”

Someone snorts. “What’s with the accent, Queen Victoria?” Agent Carter pauses, eyes narrowing. “Thought I was signing up for the U.S. Army.” It’s the blond bully from the bus. Steve would pretend to be surprised at his lack of respect, but his Ma had always said to be honest _._

Agent Carter turns on her heel and unhurriedly goes to stand in front of the soldier. She’s got a look in her eye like the one Steve’s Ma would sometimes get when people on the street dismissed her based on nothing but the lilt in her accent. As if being the child of immigrants had made her a lesser life form. Steve has gotten that reaction from strangers many times, too, but never for his accent. That’s as Brooklyn as they come.

“What’s your name, soldier?” Agent Carter asks.

“Gilmore Hodge, your Majesty,” Hodge snarks, head tilted back insolently.

“Step forward, Hodge.” The men exchange looks, some of the others also having caught on to the ice in Carter’s eyes. Hodge takes a big step forward, almost coming toe to toe with Agent Carter, who merely leans back on her heels. “Put your right foot forward.”

Hodge does so, humming low in his throat. “We gonna’ wrestle? ‘Cause I got a few moves I think you’d like.” The insolent fool winks.

The next moment, Hodge is bent over clutching his nose. Agent Carter had punched him like a particularly vicious boxer, barely pausing. Steve falls a little love just then, just a little bit.

As the recruits snicker nervously, a jeep drives up. An older officer with a deeply lined face and a permanently disgruntled frown gets out. He barks out a greeting to Agent Carter, who stands at parade rest like she didn’t just drop a man to his knees with a single punch, her face carefully arranged to show no emotion. Her tone, however, makes it clear that she respects this man.

“Colonel Phillips.”

“Carter. _Boy_. Get your ass up outta that dirt and stand in that line at attention ‘til somebody comes tells ya what to do,” he barks at Hodge who scrambles back into line with as much grace as someone with a still bleeding nose can.

Colonel Phillips surveys the recruits with a look of vague disgust, as if there were a thousand places he’d rather be than at this dusty camp in New Jersey, and a thousand men he’d rather be looking at than their sorry faces. It’s impressive, really, and Steve was raised by Sarah Rogers and her merciless wielding of Irish-Catholic guilt when it suited her needs in the nursing ward or dealing with her son’s more bullheaded ideas. Bucky’s presence had been a blessing in the Rogers household, keeping Steve just a tiny bit more out of trouble.

Having stared them down and made them feel about two inches tall, Colonel Phillips launches into a speech. “General Patton has said that wars are fought with weapons, _but they are won by men_. We are gonna win war because we have the best—” his gaze pauses at Steve. Steve pretends not to be insulted by the withering look. “—men. And because they’re gonna get better. _Much_ better. The Strategic Scientific Reserve is an Allied effort made up of the best minds in the free world. Our goal is to create the best army in history, but every army starts with one man. At the end of this process, we will choose that man. He will be the first in a new breed of supersoldiers.” A pause. “Hop to it, men!”

And so begins two weeks of hell.

You’d think the physical aspect would be the toughest and by God, it is, but the mental acclimatization is almost worse. Their drill sergeant, Michael Duffy, is a hawkeyed, tenor-voiced man who proclaims everything out loud in the manner of a particularly offended preacher. They are taught to fold their clothes, make their beds, and dress themselves, as if they were children whom their parents had failed severely. Steve has never liked being told what to do, mostly because he’s always been told that he _couldn’t_ do anything; he has to bite his tongue and pray for patience more times than he can count.

Given the time pressure, they’re thrown into it all head-first, no buts about it. It doesn’t matter that you’ve never scaled a rope ladder before, you scale that ladder and you do it now, now, now, _Rogers_! Steve almost twists his ankle clean off, scrambling to keep up. Get on your belly, crawl, recruit! Can’t stand for how your knees are shaking with sheer exhaustion? Get on your feet or get dead, recruit! On and on and on it goes, and no one wants to help the skinny asthmatic. It _is_ an audition, after all.

The worst, by far, is hand-to-hand combat training. Steve, being the smallest guy there, always ends up forcibly paired with whatever unlucky bastard too slow to make a dash for another partner. Bucky’s teaching seems to have been for naught; Steve can make a fist and take a punch and get back on his feet until he stumbles around, dizzy and in pain, but none of the men are willing to show him anything but the smack of their hands or the swipe of their legs. He ends up on the ground more times than he can count while Colonel Phillips watches from the sidelines, his storm-cloud of a face growing darker by the minute.

By day four, Steve’s a walking, talking bruise and that’s when Agent Carter seeks him out.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve's patience is tested and he learns to fight smart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> should I warn for cussing? Steve cusses. it's just not realistic that he never does in the movies, okay? also, i use "queer" as a positive and/or neutral umbrella term for non-straight and/or non-cis individuals.

The mess hall is a busy, noisy place. The tables are scuffed and despite being meticulously cleaned after every meal they’re still stained from coffee spills and whatever boiled monstrosity Camp Lehigh sees fit to serve on Tuesdays.

Steve is poking at said mystery casserole when an unfamiliar secretary comes to fetch him, making everyone in the hall sit up and take notice as he’s led from the mess in puzzlement. He hasn’t done anything to deserve an official reprimand, has in fact been more solicitous than he’d ever thought possible, and whenever he and Hodge butt heads both are quick to back off before Duffy or Phillips need to get involved. Hodge likes to push the boundaries of Steve’s patience and the camp’s rules, but he never outright disobeys an order and is careful not to seem insubordinate in public. In private, Steve’s small space in the barracks has been messed with more than once. Nothing big, just an untucked sheet, or his boots unlaced and haphazardly kicked under the bed. Steve doesn’t outwardly react, but inside he’s seething. Bucky would be proud of his restraint.

But instead of being led to Phillip’s quarters once they’ve entered the office building, the secretary heads for another door and knocks twice. Much to Steve’s surprise, it’s Agent Carter who appears to thank the secretary before waving Steve inside. 

 Her office is a small, shared room with four desks shoved together in the center to allow for as much wall access as possible. Overflowing cork boards hang on the upper halves of the walls while file cabinets obscure the lower halves. Pleasant smells like typewriter ink and paper and coffee linger in the air.

Steve falls into parade rest, forcing down the urge to salute despite knowing that that would be improper. There’s just something about Carter that makes it feel like she outranks him on sheer personality alone, and so, parade rest seems the safest bet.

Carter looks him over, but whatever conclusions she draws she keeps to herself, nothing showing on her face. It’s a curious sensation, being judged and yet kept in suspense. Usually, people can’t wait to show just how lacking they find him. Is she waiting for him to do something? He’s never been asked to join a woman alone before. Is he making too much eye-contact? What’s the right amount of eye-contact?

“Have you had any formal hand-to-hand training before?” she finally asks.

“No, ma’am.”

“Informal, then?”

“Some, ma’am. A friend tried to teach me boxing, but he wasn’t formally trained then either.”

“Then?”

“He’s a sergeant now, ma’am. Shipped out.”

Carter nods as if to herself, humming thoughtfully. “That explains a lot.”

“Beg pardon, ma’am?”

“You try to fight like a man twice your size,” she says bluntly, gaze direct. “Like someone who relies on strength alone. It’s doing you no favors, and the recruits all know it.”

So, he _is_ here for a dressing down and he _was_ found wanting. He should be used to it, but it stings all the same, especially from Carter who’s overseen parts of their training and is never slow to crack the metaphorical whip whenever she’s displeased with their efforts. Curiously, she’s never addressed these issues directly to Steve before, making this all the more uncomfortable. Being so awful he must be reprimanded in private? God help him.  

“I’ll do better, ma’am.” What else can he say? _I’ll grow a foot and gain two-hundred pounds to put some weight behind my punches_? Some extra padding might make taking a hit a whole lot easier, now that he thinks on it.

“Yes, you will,” Carter says. “Because I’ll be in charge of your extra training from now on.”

For a moment, Steve’s pretty sure he’s heard her wrong. It’s happened before. His bad ear has messed up the words spoken, his brain translating them into something entirely different. His manners desert him and he sputters out meaningless syllables, none forming proper words.

Agent Carter stares him down, a challenge in her eyes. “Sergeant Duffy is a fine officer who knows how to bring out the most in his men. But he’s never trained someone like you before. Not that I have either, but I’m more familiar with the type of fighting that doesn’t rely on muscle alone.”

Steve is still gaping like a fish. A shadow passes over Carter’s face, not quite annoyance but something almost like it; she looks about ready to fight Steve right there to show him just how capable she is.

There’s only one answer. “Yes, ma’am.”

She relaxes slightly, pleased with his answer. Steve can’t quite look her in the eye, thoroughly chastened for his hesitance. After instructing him to keep their agreement to himself and where to meet with her, she sends him off.

*

Despite Colonel Phillips and Sergeant Duffy both knowing about the extra training, Steve isn’t excused from the regular training. Whether that is because they’re trying not to call attention to the fact that one of their recruits need special treatment—and in that case, they’d have to address Hodge actively sabotaging Steve’s interactions with the other men, and as it is, Hodge seems a favorite with the officers—or whether it’s because they know that none of the men will take kindly to Steve being taught by a dame, well, that’s anyone’s guess.

Privately, Steve thinks the latter is the more stupid. Any man under Carter’s purview knows she doesn’t go easy on anyone, and if they’re stupid enough to think that just because she’s a woman she’ll be soft, then they truly deserve whatever’s coming to them when Carter finds out.

On the first day of his new lessons, Steve goes through the ordinary schedule like nothing’s changed. It’s a hot day; the air is stifling, the ground parched and kicking up dust, agitating Steve’s lungs.

Duffy leads them on a run around the camp, somehow calling out disparaging remarks all the way, cussing everyone out from how they run to the way their mothers must have dropped them on their heads as children. Steve would give his left lung for his right to work just half as well as Sergeant Duffy’s.

He’s fallen way behind when the others hit the halfway mark.

“Pick up the pace, ladies! Let’s go, let’s go! _Double time_! Come on, faster! Faster! Move! Move!”

It’s a struggle to keep moving. Dizziness has set in. Lying down to die would be a blessing but Steve will be damned if he dies in fucking _Jersey_.

Up ahead, a flagpole marks the halfway point, the flag hanging listlessly in the still, hot air. Parked nearby is a jeep with no roof; Agent Carter is perched in the passenger seat, eyes keen on the approaching soldiers, and an unknown officer in the driver’s seat.

“Squad, halt!”

 _Thank fucking God_. Steve pours his remaining energy into catching up and stumbles to a stop at the edge of the group, uncaring that he’s panting like a dog in heat and sweating buckets. The too-dry air hurts in his throat. Standing is a chore.

Duffy appears as fresh as a daisy, not even winded. He crosses his arms and surveys them all with his stern gaze, then jerks his head at the flagpole. “That flag means we’re only at the halfway point. First man to bring it to me gets a ride back with Agent Carter. Move, ladies, _move_!”

The other recruits immediately hurry to the pole, bouncing around it like dogs trying to scare a cat from a tree, swiping at the air as if they’ll ever reach it that way. It’s an uncoordinated, messy effort. Steve lingers on the sidelines, still catching his breath and trying not to faint. Finally, Hodge gets the bright idea to climb the pole, getting a foot up from one of the others and clinging to it as tightly as possible. However, the pole proves too smooth and there are no viable footrests.

“If that’s all you’ve got, this army is in trouble!” Duffy scolds, an amused glint in his eyes. With sudden clarity, Steve understands that they aren’t meant to bring down the flag; it’s just another test of control. Duffy says jump, they jump—asking how high would be considered backtalk and reprimanded. “Get up there, Hodge! Come on, get up there!” A guffaw. “Nobody’s got that flag in seventeen years! It saddens me just lookin’ at you! Now fall back into line, _fall in_ , I said! Get back into formation, you lazy pigs! We’re taking the long way back!”

But Steve doesn’t fall in. He’s finally somewhat steady on his feet; anger at the humiliation and indignity of these pointless tests of obedience has made him strong enough to get his breathing under control. There’s no better motivation for Steve than spite. He approaches, eyeing the flag so far above, running his eyes over the pole from top to bottom. It’s kept upright by just a few pieces of metal.

“Rogers! I said _fall in_!” Duffy bellows as if from far away.

Ignoring his commanding officer, Steve crouches. The pin holding it all together is secured with a small nut, slightly rusted, but easily moved. He unscrews it and pulls the pin.

The world seems silent as the pole comes down, bouncing once, twice, before settling. Steve calmly walks to the far end and frees the flag from its tether, then hands it to Sergeant Duffy as he passes him on the way to the car. The sergeant is staring, mouth open.

“Thank you, sir,” Steve says, careful not to seem too cheeky. He nods at Agent Carter and settles into the back seat. She, too, is barely restraining her mirth, laughter dancing in her eyes.

Driving back with the wind in his air is a blessing.

However, that brief moment of confidence has ebbed by the time he meets Carter in the restricted gym behind the office buildings. Steve has never been in there before, it being for the use of high-ranking officers only, but Carter told him to be there and he’s not about to question her. Aloud. If he got killed by a dame for asking questions, Bucky would probably resurrect his ghost and exorcise it into a lower circle of hell out of pure spite.

Despite rarely seeing use, the gym smells of male sweat and damp cloth, a familiar smell that makes Steve think of Goldie’s Gym where Bucky taught him to box. He’s in a t-shirt and cargo pants, and Carter’s in a buttoned shirt and loose-fitting trousers, her dark hair twisted into a low bun.

“You did well today,” she says briskly, wasting no time. “You used your head, and _that_ is what we’ll use, too. If you can’t overpower your opponent, outsmart them.”

Despite focusing on smarts—gauging reactions, using your surroundings, employing every single dirty trick that would get you disqualified for dishonorable fighting in a proper fight, “this isn’t the bloody championship ring, there are not judges to call foul, so you better fight dirtier than your opponent”—explaining where to aim your punch for maximum damage and minimum effort also rates high in her estimation.

“Why do you think I punched Hodge in the nose? Couldn’t a black eye have gotten the point across just as well?” Apparently not. The eye is protected simply by being placed largely inside the skull, the cheekbone and brow and nose raised as if to cradle it. The nose alone, however, is largely cartilage; it takes very little pressure to break, you’ve just got to know how to aim.

“If your opponent is already disoriented, or if you’ve got something to add weight to your punch, say, the butt of a gun, go for the jaw. If their head’s already fuzzy, another good hit can potentially destabilize them entirely.” Her instructions get further and further from honorable, adding the neck, throat, and ear to the list of almost effortless but entirely vicious hits. If it weren’t for the accent and the poise, you’d almost think she’d grown up in the back alleys of Brooklyn, too.

“You don’t protest nearly as much as I’d thought you would,” Carter admits as they’re taking a break to drink some water.

Steve hasn’t protested at all, but he’s not going to point that out. “Everything you say makes good sense, ma’am.”

“Hm. You seem to be familiar with quite a few of these moves. Did you grow up fighting?”

“Yes, ma’am.” That feels a little dishonest. “Though I mostly grew up being beaten up. Don’t think there’s a place left in all of Brooklyn that I haven’t gotten punched.” _Why the fuck would you add that, Rogers?_

Carter watches him shrewdly. “Did you have something against running away?”

Steve shrugs. “You start running away, you’ll never stop. You stand up, you push back.” He laughs self-consciously. “Can’t be underestimated forever, right?”

“I know a little of what that’s like,” Carter admits, chin pushed out like it angers her just to admit it. “To have every door shut in your face, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

“I guess they just see a beautiful dame.” Carter makes an incredulous grimace. _Shit. Fuck._ “A beautiful woman! An agent, not a dame! You _are_ beautiful, but—uh, ma’am—” _shit, shit, shit_.

Thank God and all his saints, Agent Carter puts him out of his misery with a blunt, “You have no idea how to talk to women, do you?”

Steve looks away, flushing heatedly. There goes any respect he’d earned with her. “This is probably the longest conversation I’ve had with one. At least outside of a classroom debate. Women ain’t exactly lining up to dance with a guy who might die on ‘em.” He says the last part with a shrug, so used to dismissal that admitting it barely hurts anymore. Well, it doesn’t hurt any more than it usually does. _Shut up, Rogers._

“You must have danced?” Is he hearing this wrong, or is there a wistful note in her voice?

He has danced, but mostly with Bucky. He’d been waltzed around the Barneses’ living room when they were teenagers, and they had had one failed attempt at lindy hopping when Steve’s prom was coming up—not that he’d invited anyone to go with him, but Bucky had insisted on teaching him anyhow. Rather than admitting all that, Steve just shrugs. “Well… asking a woman to dance always seemed so terrifying.” And not worth it for the pity in their eyes when they looked down at him. “And these past few years it just didn’t seem to matter that much, what with everything happening in Europe. Figured I’d just… wait.”

“For what?”

Bucky had once let Steve twirl him around in their apartment, the sunshine peeking through the curtains. “The right partner.”

*

He goes to bed that night, a little proud that he hadn’t seem to offend Carter too much or earned any everlasting ire. At the end of their session, she’d instructed him to call her Peggy— “might as well,” she’d said, “we’ll be practicing punches tomorrow, let’s just deal away with that formality”—and he’d offered the use of his name in return.

The barracks had filled with snores long before Steve finally settled down, reminding him of home in the oddest way. He himself snores, or so Bucky has informed him; a great, steady rumble that shouldn’t be possible for such a slight fella. But Bucky _also_ snores, or rather makes odd noises. It’s not so much when he breathes in; it’s when he lets the air back out and a sound like a whining hum emerges with it.

Bucky will have reached London by now. Has he gone further, or has a sudden bombing kept him captive in the strange city? He’d once bragged to Steve that he’d know his way around the city just from reading so many Sherlock Holmes novels, a past-time that Steve simply hadn’t had the patience for. Reading too long makes his head hurt and the prose in those books is slow, and nothing ever seems to happen except suddenly it does, and then you’ve got to read the whole thing all over again except from the villains’ perspective. He much prefers _The Hobbit_ , feels a kinship with little Bilbo Baggins, and can, if he absolutely has to, endure Bucky’s science fiction novels that are always spread around the apartment.

Is Bucky already changed from his time away from New York, away from Steve and his family and his many admirers, as if this untethering has disconnected him from the coils of memory and reality entirely? Does he feel proud, knowing he’s got work to do to ensure the freedom of the world, or is he simply tired the way he sometimes was whenever Steve got in particularly nasty fights—like that time with the poor queer kid getting the shit kicked out of him. Bucky had disappeared from the apartment for days and come back with busted, swollen knuckles, and those boys who’d done the kicking had been running from the very sight of him ever since. He’d forbidden Steve from fighting that kind of fight again, saying that people would get the wrong idea. But he’d still cleaned Steve’s injuries with gentle hands and sad, proud eyes.

When Steve falls asleep, he dreams of home.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve learns of the true purpose of the supersoldier program and meets the first (American) survivor of the serum.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're lookin' for action, this ain't it; it's mostly exposition. ever since I learned of Isaiah Bradley via the first Young Avengers comics, i had been intrigued by his story. i feel that it's important for Steve to recognize early on that the powers-that-be do not care for its subjects even as they are at its mercy.

Something strange is going on at Camp Lehigh and Steve’s no fool. Being easily and constantly dismissed has the single upside that it allows him to observe all manner of things unseen where others would have been chased off. For one, he’s noticed that Dr. Erskine is never without an armed escort of some kind—and that said escort is just as focused on Erskine himself as anybody around him. For another, there are a lot more civilians coming and going from base than Steve thinks is strictly normal. Men in suits and their assorted lackeys, important by the look of them, hair slicked back and self-important attitudes in place. They never stay long, and they’re kept well away from the recruits.

Steve ponders it at night, but never for long. He’s too tired.

A week in, and he finds out why that was a mistake.

He’s leaving a session with Peggy, slowly rotating his aching shoulder. Peggy had been showing him how to twist out of a hold; he’d underestimated her strength and twisted _wrong_. It’d been a few severely uncomfortable minutes while Steve tried not to howl in pain and Peggy apologized by lecturing him about not thinking things through. About to exit the building, he almost walks right into a living, breathing mountain, stumbling back and looking up, up, up.

A tall, muscular, black man looks back at him, dark eyes curious as he takes in Steve’s slight stature and rumpled appearance. He is dressed in army fatigues, shirt stretched tight over his barrel-like chest, sleeves nearly bursting around his biceps.

Dr. Erskine peeks out from behind the soldier, owlishly surprised. “Steven? What are you doing here?”

Steve drags his eyes away. “Training with Agent Carter, sir. She figured it was best to keep away from the more public grounds.”

“Ah, of course,” Erskine smiles. He gestures to the soldier. “This is Private Isaiah Bradley, he’s here at my request.”

The giant holds out his hand to Steve and they shake. The grip is firm but not crushing. Steve likes him for that, likes that there’s still strength shining through even though it’s likely that Bradley gentled his handshake just for Steve. Being bruised, he looks more fragile than usual.

“Steven is one of our candidates,” Erskine says.

Bradley raises both brows in surprise, and he looks back at Steve as if to re-evaluate him. “I see,” he says with no inflection as to the nature of his thoughts. Steve, however, gets the sense that there’s something he’s missing, something important.

Despite having surprised them, Steve is invited to come along and observe. Observe _what_ , exactly, he doesn’t know, but it immediately becomes apparent.

Erskine runs Private Bradley through a set of drills, each at first seeming a standard exercise but quickly becoming something else entirely; they are clearly designed for a soldier at his absolute peak. Bradley runs laps around the private gym at a steady but speedy pace, and when he stops he winds down real quick; he’s made to sling a large number of the heavy punching bags over his shoulders and carry them around, lifting each one carefully but without difficulty, even as he balances more weight than an ordinary man should be able to and still be standing. He climbs the ropes agilely, is quick on his feet and graceful in every movement, and when he finally gets to test out the punching bags for real, his hits are sure and strong. There may even be small streaks of sawdust evacuating the bag with every punch.

Erskine takes notes, face set in a serious frown.

Steve watches it all with a sinking heart. If there’s a soldier as good as Bradley, what chance does Steve have at being chosen? Erskine didn’t say that Bradley was a part of the selection process, but who wouldn’t waive procedure for him? With him on their side, the war will be won before the year’s out.   

Afterwards, the three men eat a late dinner. Though Steve is way off regular bootcamp schedule no one sends him away while in the company of Erskine, thank God; his stomach’s starting to digest itself. They’re served boiled potatoes and the stringiest beef that Steve’s ever had—and given the kind of meat he and Bucky has had to make do with back home that’s saying a lot.

It’s quiet for the most part, all of them keeping their eyes on their own plates and their heads down despite being almost totally alone in the mess. Erskine is thoughtful, a distracted twitch running down his arm as he circles, circles the rim of his coffee cup with his fingers. It’s awkward as hell, almost like every double-date Steve’s ever been on; as if they’re all waiting for someone to make the first move—but at the same time refusing to be the one to do it. Steve’s not usually a coward, but even he can be stumped. If the bullies back home had known that all it took to shut Steve up was a social gathering of any size, they might have chained him down in a dancehall and left him to his fate.

It’s Bradley who breaks the silence, glancing around to make sure they’re out of earshot before speaking. “Have you always wanted to be a soldier?”

Steve shrugs. “I want to do the right thing. If that means being a soldier, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“What if _whatever it takes_ means that you’ll always be a soldier?” Bradley asks slowly, not meeting Steve’s eyes. “This program… it’s not just training.”

He chews slowly. “What do you mean?” Steve’s eyes flicker between Bradley and Erskine, who has sat up at the mention of the program. His lips are pinched, but his eyes are regretful; whatever Bradley’s hinting at, it’s the truth.

“The supersoldier is not just an ordinary soldier trained to peak performance. It’s more like reanimation, a transformation from a man to a weapon.” He jerks a thumb at himself. “I am the only survivor, at least on this side of the war.”

Erskine looks away in shame.

What follows is a harrowing tale of neglect and abuse. Isaiah Bradley had been going through basecamp at Camp Cathcart when he was called in for a check-up. He hadn’t thought anything of it at first; the doctor had done a brief examination, then sent him off with a preventative tetanus shot. All his fellow recruits went through the same, it was thought to be routine.

Then they’d started falling ill.

It was nothing major at first, low fevers, nausea, headaches. They’d been sent back to the doctor’s and received another shot, and another, and another, and another. It was the only thing that kept the pain at bay. Bradley hadn’t been as bad off as a lot of the other recruits, his aches being largely centered in his joints and not entirely unlike the ache borne of hard work and sore muscles. The shots merely dampened the pain at night, allowed him to sleep so deeply he felt brand-new in the morning.

“Dr. Reinstein seemed more occupied by my progression than any of my friends’,” Bradley tells Steve, eyes sightless as he relives it all. “Any fat and softness I’d had seemed to slouch right off, only to be replaced by muscle. I was hungry all the time—the CO’s pushed me harder than any other, so I told myself it was just my body reacting to the circumstances.”

“It wasn’t,” Steve guesses hoarsely. Bradley slowly shakes his head.

Erskine clears his throat. “Dr. Reinstein and I had worked together in Germany before the war. Back then, he went by the name of Wilfred Nagel. Like many others, he fled the country when things got bad. Before that, he had been the first to know of my research and had witnessed parts of my first attempts to create the supersoldier serum. After what happened with the first… recipient…” he loses his trail of thought, closing his eyes against recollection. “I came to this country in hope of amnesty and a chance to right my wrongs.”

And America had been pleased—but impatient and paranoid. At Erskine’s refusal to hand over the formula, they were forced to concede but not graciously. They allowed him to live on their dime and perfect the serum before subjecting anyone else to it. But, while Erskine worked tirelessly, picking up the pieces of his mistakes, America had had a contingency lying in wait; they had already had Dr. Reinstein in their possession, and he was not nearly as scrupulous. They knew the process would be gristly and while unwilling to sign off on the experiments, they contended themselves with willful ignorance.

“They knew we were nothing more than lab rats. They knew we hadn’t agreed to anything, knew we thought we were just going through basecamp. We were expendable. The American supersoldier can’t be black, but the black man can be used to ensure the white man’s success.”

The soldiers had all been given slightly different versions of the serum, the base compound concocted in accordance with every detail Reinstein could remember from Erskine’s process. While Erskine had been frightened by the effects of the unfinished serum, Reinstein had been encouraged. It had worked, after all; not without consequence, but that was but a minor bump in the road. What were three hundred lives in the face of the means to win the war? The government’s blind eye confirmed this: the lives of three hundred ordinary black men were nothing compared to the safety of America.

“I lived, but my life is no longer my own, much less so than any other soldier. No one can be condemned, because the brass will say they didn’t know, and I’m nothing but another black soldier, useful until I’m not. I was like you. I was willing to fight and to die for a cause. It wasn’t enough. But I can’t be their supersoldier, either; America can’t stand the thought of a black man as the face of their freedom—even if his own freedom is a lie.”

“The serum that Isaiah received is not exactly the same as the serum I have developed,” Erskine adds, fiddling with his cutlery. “I don’t know exactly what Reinstein did to it, only that Isaiah’s blood tests show significant differences to my own data. Who knows how long it’ll affect him, whether it’s permanent, what the side-effects will be? It’s not the same as the serum that was tested in Germany, but it isn’t fully the serum as it is now either.”

“Doesn’t Reinstein know?” Steve asks.

Erskine’s lips twist into a pained, grim smile. “Reinstein’s dead.” The tone makes it clear that it was not a natural death. It makes you wonder who killed him; did the Nazis get to him? Did one of the poor men under his so-called care find out and lose control? Or was the army finally forced to recognize his actions but unwilling to accept the consequences? Either way, his death, as his work, serves America.  

At the end of the tale, Steve is sick to his stomach. He aches for the horror inflicted upon the men at Camp Cathcart, aches for Isaiah, the sole survivor, and for his enslavement to the very government that used his body as a petri dish for their desperation. How can the end be justified at the cost of humanity?

“So if you have doubts,” Isaiah says, blunt and patient and much too kind to a bullheaded boy from Brooklyn who signed on without even asking what for, “quit now. Run while you still can.”

Indecision wars in Steve’s belly. On one hand, fighting is still the right thing, not just for the future but for the people already hurting. How many have been incarcerated? How many children dead for nothing but their heritage and faith? How many people brutalized in the name of power? Steve would give his body and his life to defend them all.

But, on the other hand, has not his country proved to be as unkind, as power-hungry and bigoted, as the enemies they are fighting?

Had he been anyone else, he would have turned tailed then and there. Bucky would have been smart enough to do so. But Steve doesn’t run. Not from a fight and not from the truth. “I have to,” he admits, burning with passion and shame at once.

Isaiah nods in understanding. “I know. So do I.”

When they come back from the war, maybe they’ll still be soldiers, Steve thinks—but for their own causes this time. He’s never loved his country just for what it is; he’d have to be dumb, deaf, blind, and dead for that to be true. He’s too poor, too Irish, too frail, too righteous to ever be welcomed exactly as he is. There are people just as disadvantaged and just as strong as he in every state, every city; be it because of the color of their skin, their faith in a god, whom they fall in love with, what use their bodies is to the privileged elite that rule them all. Is not the history of the United States written in the blood of the unfortunate, in the sweat and tears of those who cling to the idea of a better life?

This sickness, this fear and hate and ignorance, it can’t be all there is. It’s what America _can be_ that matters to Steve. When the words mounted on the pedestal of the Mother of Exiles finally ring true, Steve will be done. _Give me your tired, your poor / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!_

Until then, he is a soldier. The thought is not as comforting as it used to be.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve is chosen for the supersoldier project.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not that it will be relevant for this part of Steve's story, but I have seen Endgame. I won't be including any spoilers, don't worry. I'll be going in quite another direction, should the gods grant me the will to write that much (not just in regards to Endgame, but Infinity War as well).

“Faster, recruits! Come on! My grandmother has more life in her, God rest her soul,” Peggy barks at them, pacing as the recruits all scramble to complete their exercises to her satisfaction. “ _Move it!_ ”

Steve feels like he’s dying. Or at least working his way into an asthma attack. Still, he’s been working out for longer than he’d been able to when he first got to Camp Lehigh, has improved all around, even if the other men can’t seem to see it.

His training with Peggy has paid off, so much so that he actually won a fight—and was promptly reprimanded for his victory being unsportsmanlike, though Sergeant Duffy had been restraining a smile as he said it. Apparently kicking someone when they’re down is a no-go in war, where the enemy will definitely give you the benefit of courtesy. Steve had had to restrain the urge to roll his eyes and started relying on defensive moves entirely. It made him less of a target.

Peggy is a brilliant teacher. She’s sharp as a tack, stronger than anyone would expect a dame to be, and there’s something so incredibly awe-inspiring about her complete and utter bullheadedness. If anything, Steve’s almost started enjoying her putting him on his ass, if only because it feels like there’s a sort of camaraderie in it.

Maybe he’s just lonely.

Out the corner of his eye, Steve notices Erskine and Phillips observing them, engaged in a heated debate over something or other. Phillips looks even more disgruntled than usual, jowls quivering with ire as he speaks. Erskine is unruffled, as if his mind has been made up and nothing, come hell or highwater, can move him. That’s all Steve sees before Peggy has them drop to the ground to do push-ups.

He’d written a letter to Bucky last night. Or, well, he’d tried. He’d tried to put words to his convictions, tried telling Bucky of his days when nothing he said would possibly make it through the censorship. It had been a mess of scribbles and scratches by then end. He couldn’t tell him about Isaiah, who’s gone west to the Pacific by now. He couldn’t tell him of the supersoldier project, lest the letter was intercepted; couldn’t bear to tell him of the Camp, even, lest Steve is rejected at the end. The not-letter’s in his trunk now, unfinished.

“Up!” Peggy commands.

They struggle to their feet. Peggy’s a sterner taskmaster than almost anyone. She directs them into jumping-jacks, despairing of them dramatically all the while. “Get moving!”

A small, dark object lands on the ground, bouncing towards the center of their gathering.

“ _Grenade!_ ”

The effect is instantaneous; everything happens with at once. And yet, when Steve thinks back on it later, it’ll be as is time slowed. The other recruits scatter, taking cover. But not Steve, and not Peggy. Steve just happen to be closer.

He throws himself on the grenade, curling his body around it. It won’t do much, but it’ll keep the blast contained, give everyone a chance to get to safety. Peggy’s still running towards him. “Get away!” he screams at her. “Get back!”

 He waits and waits and waits and nothing happens. Peggy has stumbled to a stop, eyes wide. She’s panting from shock. Off to the side, Phillips stands agog, surprise etched in every line on his face.

The other recruits peek out from whatever they’ve thrown themselves behind. Steve spots Hodge, the other man’s golden hair ruffled and his eyes still wide with fear. Adrenaline is still pumping through Steve, filtering him slowly back into the world as if through an ocean of sound.

“It was a dummy grenade,” an officer yells. “All clear. Back in formation.”

Steve unfurls his limbs slowly. The grenade doesn’t even look real upon inspection. Its shell is obviously made of some kind of painted scrap metal, not actual iron. He looks up at Phillips and Erskine slowly. “Is this a test?”

Erskine smiles at him, casting a victorious glance at Phillips who mutters under his breath and stalks off.

_Bucky can never know about this_.

*

That night, he’s told he’s been selected as the first supersoldier subject. Phillips looks grim as he relays the news, doubt plain on his face. Steve wonders whether Phillips would have preferred Dr. Reinstein’s methods rather than Erskine’s, then chastises himself for that thought. Phillips, while sour ever at the best of times, hasn’t done anything to deserve such accusations. It’s just Isaiah’s story lingering in the back of Steve’s mind.

He’s moved to another cabin for the night. He’s not quite sure how to handle the news; nervousness settles in his gut, a swirling mass that feels both like never-ending hunger and constant nausea. It works its way through him, making him tense and jittery, his already unsteady heartbeat stuttering. If this works, he’ll be going to war. If it doesn’t… he’ll probably be dead.

He should have written that letter to Bucky—to the Barneses, to their neighbors. Just an explanation. A goodbye, in case things go wrong. Steve would die if he found out about Bucky’s fate from a third- or fourth-hand source, wouldn’t be able to go on not knowing exactly what had happened, or where Bucky had been, who’d been there with him, who’d claimed his body and where it was now.

_God, I need a drink._

He should probably go to confession, too, settle things with God just in case.

Before he can get up, Erskine knocks on the doorframe, poking his balding head through the open door. He has a flask of something see-through in his hand, and kindness shines upon his face. “May I?”

“Yeah,” Steve says weakly, gesturing him inside.

Erskine settles on the bed across from Steve with a sigh. “Can’t sleep?”

Steve shrugs. “I got the jitters, I guess.” _Understatement._

It makes Erskine laugh, at least. “Me, too.”

They fall into a slightly awkward silence, heavy with the weight of tomorrow. So much hinges on the success of this procedure. Steve’s very _life_ hinges on it. God, Bucky’s going to _kill_ him if he survives.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Erskine blinks. “Just one?”

“Why me?”

It’s been bugging him for a while. All the other recruits have been somewhat like the men Steve has been passed over for in the recruitment offices, strong men with bodies toned from physical labor. He’s the only outlier, an oddity, a parakeet in an aviary filled with eagles. And to have been chosen? Something doesn’t add up; he’s well aware that a plucky attitude isn’t enough to sway the people expecting results now, now, _now_.

“I suppose that is the only question that matters,” Erskine admits, looking down at the bottle in his hands. He holds it up, shakes it a little. “This is schnapps. It’s from Augsburg. My city. So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own. You know, after the last war the… my people struggled, Jewish and goyim alike. We felt… weak, I suppose. Small. But while some picked up the pieces, others failed to move on. And along comes Hitler—with the marching and the big show and the flags and the—and the…”

Erskine takes a deep breath. There is sorrow in the twist of his lips, anger at the corner of his eyes.

He continues. “He promises a way out. He tells them they can be strong again. They believe him—they’re too hungry to ignore him. Too angry. And he… he has heard of me. My work. I suppose it doesn’t matter that I am a Jew as long as I am useful. He finds me and he says, ‘you will make us strong’. As if my work would be penance for my existence. Well, I am not interested, I tell him that.”

But that was not the end of it, Steve knows. The tale unfolds in the lonely cabin, a secret spilled and sorrow shared. Erskine tells him of the Nazi experimental science department, how it is headed by a man called Johann Schmidt, himself a brilliant mind. It was to him that Erskine’s capture and keeping was entrusted, surely a great honor as far as Nazi thinking goes. He was supposed to force the secret formula from Erskine and employ it to turn the German soldiers into an army without equal. They’d have been unstoppable.

But Schmidt was impatient. Deranged even.

Schmidt had risen quickly within the Party, sharing with Hitler an interest for the occult—especially Norse and Teutonic mythology. But whereas Hitler had used it as props in his vision of power, Schmidt had grown to be consumed by it. He’d started to believe in the heroes of old, believed that he could become one of them.

“He could not resist once he heard about my formula,” Erskine confesses. “Just the thought of it made him reckless. He had to become the superior man. I had no choice—except death, but I was a coward. It is my greatest shame.”

Schmidt had been the first human subject for the serum, too eager to wait and too proud to let another become the first supersoldier. But the serum hadn’t been refined yet, had only just been in the early stages.

“Did it make him stronger?”

“Yes. But there were…. Other effects. It wasn’t ready. I hadn’t originally conceived of it as a means to make soldiers. We had seen too much war—especially my people. We were all suffering. We became prone to disease, to hunger. I wanted to make our bodies strong enough to survive such trials, so that we would all rise and rebuild our nation. But the formula did so much more.”     

In the aftermath of Schmidt’s disastrous transformation, the fortified villa holding Erskine had descended into chaos, allowing Allied agents to enter and escape with Erskine in tow. Schmidt had still been alive, but by the skin of his teeth.

“I was brought here by Agent Carter and a very reckless, clever man, Mr. Howard Stark; you’ll meet him tomorrow.” _Bucky is gonna shit himself with envy._

“That doesn’t answer why I was chosen though,” Steve stresses. “Isaiah said America wouldn’t accept him, but every other man here have impressed the officers. It doesn’t seem like I’ll be received any better than Isaiah, so how did you get them to take me?”

Erskine smiles. “The first time we spoke, do you remember what I said about the man who had tried five times? That I cared more about him? Yes? Good. I was not entirely honest then—no, no! I don’t mean to take it back. I _did_ care that you appeared to be the soul of stubbornness, don’t look so mulish, Steven, it’s a compliment. But that wasn’t the first time we’d met.”

Steve frowns. Erskine laughs and tells a second story.

He’d been attending several recruitment offices to look for candidates when he’d first stumbled on an encounter between a short, skinny man and a recruitment officer. The short man had insisted he was fit for duty; the officer had disagreed, listing all the reasons why that wasn’t so. The short man had persisted. It’s not hard to guess who that man was.

“Stumbling upon you again that night, it was like fate. If nothing else, maybe this will be enough to make up for what I have created. You have turned out to be a good and kind man. And that, Steven, matters more than anything. Can a man who has never felt weakness know how to value strength, how to show compassion? No; he has no respect for power, it has served him all his life. Besides, if we succeed, maybe the serum can then become what I intended for it back at the beginning. If it can make you healthy, think of what it can do for the world!”

“Thanks,” Steve says, only a little sarcastically. “I think.”

Erskine gets up and fetches two small glasses, pours them each a drink. “No matter what happens tomorrow, you must promise me one thing.” He slides one glass towards Steve. “Don’t lose sight of who you are. Never change it or deny it. Not a perfect soldier—but a good man.” He taps Steve on the breastbone for emphasis.

It makes Steve flush with pride. Bucky would roll his eyes and call him easy for flattery—which Bucky already knows; he’s the one to compliment Steve the most. Steve had always been putty in his hands whenever that charming mouth got going. Turns out, he’s no different now. Is kindness truly so rare that the smallest sliver makes him stupid? _Nah, you do that just fine on your own, pal._

“To the little guys,” he says, clinking his glass against Erskine’s. He tips his head back, about to drink—

“To the little—No! No! Wait! Stop! What am I doing? No!” Erskine snatches the glass from Steve’s hand, almost drenching him in schnapps. “You have the procedure tomorrow. No fluids.” He sounds a bit crushed about it, too.

Steve huffs a laugh. “All right. We’ll drink it after?”

“Pfft, no! I don’t have procedure tomorrow. Drink it after? Drink it now!”

And so, Steve’s last night as Steve Rogers, a kid from Brooklyn, a decent artist, son of Sarah Rogers, best friend to Bucky Barnes, scourge (or something) to the bullies in his neighborhood and beyond, clumsy dancer, honest, good, loyal and a thousand other things, is spent laughing with a progressively drunker Jewish doctor telling progressively weirder jokes as his voice slurs and slips into Yiddish.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Project Rebirth commences and Steve suffers a loss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: minor character death. presumably, you know who it is.
> 
> btw. i might change the rating to Mature later on and i'll def be adding the major warning Graphic Depiction of Violence once Steve gets to the front, just so you're forewarned.

The procedure takes place in a laboratory in Brooklyn, a large, circular room more akin to the basement bunkers from Bucky’s weirder novels. Steve had thought it a little strange to put a secret lab up near the Navy Yard; when he’d asked about it, he’d gotten an unsatisfying explanation about a power grid and a _get moving, Rogers_.

He’s escorted back to Brooklyn by Peggy. Keenly aware of how nervous he is, she patiently listens as Steve points out all his old haunts: the parking lot he’d gotten beaten up in for telling off a guy for hustling Mrs. Chen, and the diner he’d been beaten up behind for yelling at the customers getting handsy with the waitress, and the alley where Bucky had once had to dig him out of the trash (he’d mouthed off to some fellas down at the docks, and maybe it hadn’t been a fight even worthy of his time but Steve had picked it anyway). By the time the car had come to a stop by a small haberdashery, Peggy looks about ready to put a leash on Steve to ensure he won’t stray and get into another fight if she turns her back for just two seconds.  

The laboratory is located directly beneath the shop, an even odder place for a secret lab to be located than just in Brooklyn if you ask Steve, but he supposes that’s the point. No one would walk into the shop, see the old clerk and think to themselves _probably a front for the_ _secret intelligence service_.

Now, aching with the familiarity of being back in his city, Steve steps out onto the staircase leading down to the lab itself, Peggy on his heels. Across from them, there’s an observation room teeming with officers and suited civilians. That’s all Steve can truly glean from this distance; they could be the same civilians he’s seen at the camp, but they could also be the President and General Eisenhower and he’d never know.

Scientists and technicians in white coats bustle around down in the lab proper, fluttering between clusters of bulky machinery. In the middle of it all, there’s a strange, stout, pod-like machine. It looks like a cross between a one-person submarine and a coffin, and Steve isn’t the only person eyeing it with trepidation.  

Erskine rushes towards them as they descend the staircase, carrying some sort of folded-up, tan cloth. He greets them both and somberly shakes Steve’s hand—off to the side, a camera flashes, giving Steve several minutes of black spots swimming before his eyes.

“Please, not now,” Erskine asks of the photographer. He leads Steve to a small, curtained-off area under the stairs. “Are you ready? Good. Undress in there and put these on; come out when you’re ready, leave your clothes.”

The folded-up cloth is a pair of tan army-issue shorts. At the thought of coming back out almost naked, Steve flushes a splotchy, unflattering pink. With shaking hands, he undresses, slips the shorts on. Despite the elastic band in the waist—a luxury for wartime—the shorts are loose and keeps slipping down to his hips, the material waving around his thighs almost like a skirt would.

Shoulders hunched, he rejoins Erskine.

As soon as he steps up, it feels as if all eyes are upon him. He’s almost glad that he can’t see far enough to confirm this notion. Nor can he hear exactly what’s being said all around him, but from the prickling of his skin, he’s got an inkling that it isn’t very complimentary.

Meanwhile, the pod has been opened to show an almost stretcher-like gurney inside. Erskine helps Steve onto it and puts a calming hand on his shoulder. “Comfortable?”

“It’s a little big,” Steve says, eyes bouncing around to the side of the machine. “You save me any of that schnapps after you left?”

A wry smile graces Erskine’s mouth. “Not as much as I should have. _Entschuldigung_. Next time. Mr. Stark! How are your levels?”

Mr. Stark is even more handsome in person than he’d been on stage. Up close, Steve properly glimpses the man’s large, doe-like eyes and their ever-present glint of puckish slyness. He stands over Steve, looking down at him with a self-assured air that somehow settles Steve’s nerves a little. Until he remembers the flying car crashing onto stage at the World Expo, that is.

“Levels at 100 per cent,” Mr. Stark confirms. “We may dim half the lights in Brooklyn, but we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

_Not comforting at all._

As Steve is strapped in by nurses, Erskine gently shoos Peggy off to the observation room. She looks back as she goes, and even with her back remaining straight and head held high, Steve can tell she’s just as nervous as he is. The straps are cold on Steve’s skin.

“ _Hallo_? Do you hear me? Is this on?” Erskine is saying into a microphone. He taps it once to the great discomfort for everybody. Even Steve’s bad ear picks up on the whine. “Ladies and gentlemen. Today we take, not another step towards annihilation, but the first step on the path to peace. We begin with a series of micro injections into Private Rogers’ major muscle groups. The serum infusion will cause immediate cellular change, and then, to stimulate growth, he will be saturated with Vita-Rays from Mr. Stark’s machine.”

He turns back to Steve and observes as a nurse gives Steve the first injections. It stings briefly, like the bite of winter. Steve tells Erskine this, relieved that it wasn’t worse, and is promptly informed that that was a shot of penicillin. _Oh._ It doesn’t bode well for the pain about to come.

“Serum infusion beginning in five, four, three, two, one.”

If the penicillin felt cold and sharp, the serum feels like liquid fire. Once, when Bucky had had a little extra change, they’d bought a whole bottle of whiskey just for the two of them. The golden liquid had gone down Steve’s throat down like barbed wire drenched in gasoline; this is about the same, except he can’t just cough it back up to get rid of the sensation. _God, it hurts_. _Fuck, fuck,_ _FUCK_.

“Now, Mr. Stark!”

The pod stutters into an upright position. Steve’s body and blood are shaken up like those fancy cocktails they serve in the classier bars over in Manhattan. It is thoroughly unpleasant, a hundred times more so than the rollercoaster ride at Coney Island which, until today, had been the worst thing Steve had ever endured on a dare.

The pod walls close around him. His breathing is so loud; it scratches at his throat and his lungs and around his heart.

A tap on the glass above his forehead. “Steven, can you hear me?”

It takes some time to find his voice, and when he does it’s echoes strangely. The pod is an abyss. He can’t go back. “It’s probably too late to go to the bathroom, right?”

He doesn’t hear Erskine’s answer, but the pod starts humming. It rocks him down to his bones, shakes loose his thoughts.

It’s not so bad at first. Sure, he’s in pain, but Steve’s been through pneumonia, fevers, stomach bugs, and near death before. He’s had worse. But then it settles in. A piercing ache spreading from the center of his joins, his bones twisting as if to get away from him. His heart seizes. His teeth feel like they’re being pushed from his skull. He screams.

Outside, there are people yelling. They are so loud; he can even hear them over the popping in his ears, a sensation like an icepick pushing through to his skull. Someone’s calling his name. Peggy? Erskine? He can’t distinguish between them. The voices slip into one another, molding into strange phrases and disjointed commands.

Until: “ _Kill the reactor, Mr. Stark! Turn it off! Kill it, do it_!”

“No!” Steve roars, louder than he ever has before. “Don’t! I can do this!”

They must have listened; the pain grows stronger. He’s dying. Steve’s dying. He didn’t go to confession. He didn’t finish his letters. He wants his Ma. He wants Bucky.

His heart stops.

*

The first thing to return to him is his hearing. Pity then, that the only sounds are his heaving breaths and a crushing, echoing silence. Not exactly a symphony. Still, he can hear it fully with _both_ ears.

Next is taste. His saliva is stale, rusted almost.

Then smells. Sweat. Something sterile, like medicine.

And then bodily sensation. He feels heavy. There’s an ache in places he didn’t know _could_ ache, like the back of his knees and the roots of his hair on his arms and legs and groin. There’s something—the shorts?—pressing into his stomach and thighs, uncomfortable around his dick. What he doesn’t feel, however, are the restraints. They seem to have fallen away; his skin stings where they once were.

The world filters back in.

Dr. Erskine. The pod. The serum.

The walls are moving around him, parting to let in the light. It’s too bright, even behind closed eyes. The air tastes dusty. There are hands around his wrists.

“Steven. _Steven_.”

The world is so colorful.

Erskine is looking _up_ at him, his face awash with relief. The lab seems smaller. Someone has shrunk all the machinery—and the people, it appears. Steve’s legs are slow to react, but he steps out of the machine and glances around dizzily. “We did it.” It’s only half a question.

“Yes, yes, I think we did it,” Erskine answers. His hands are gentle on Steve’s skin but even that feels like too much. Mr. Stark echoes the sentiment from Steve’s other side; his hands, too, are on Steve’s skin, more calloused than you’d expect. Steve wants them off his body, but he’s afraid he’d fall over without them. He also kind of wants to touch himself all over. _Is that my chest? Are these my calves?_ You’d be hard pressed to find sturdier legs except maybe on a draft horse.

Peggy appears in front of him. “How do you feel?” Her hands flutter anxiously in front of her and her eyes are wide. Her lips are so red—Steve had known she used red lipstick, but with his former colorblindness, the closest he could come to guessing the shade was “bright”, and only known it was red because he’d spent hours going over different colors when he was younger. God, she’s beautiful.

_Too much_ , he wants to say. _Not enough._ “Taller,” he settles on.

“You look taller,” she agrees, pulling herself together with her usual no-bullshit air and aggressively snatches the clothes a thoughtful (if shell-shocked) nurse thinks to bring him. It’s just a short-sleeved shirt, almost an undershirt, and a pair of army issue pants. He slips into them with some difficulty, but just when he thinks he’s going to fall, his body finds its balance, almost without conscious thought. The shorts are very uncomfortable, but he doesn’t want to ask for privacy to change those, just slips the pants on over them.

One of the suited civilians is enthusiastically shaking hands with Erskine, face lit with nearly orgasmic delight. He takes in Steve’s new body greedily, his cunning little eyes running over the rise and fall of every unfamiliar muscle.

It makes Steve want to bare his teeth; his mouth even pulls at the corners to form the sneer—

An explosion in the observation room rocks the building, sending glass, metal, and plaster spiraling through the air, fire and smoke hot on its heels. Everybody ducks. Steve pulls Peggy down with him, instinctively covering her smaller— _what the fuck_ —body with his own. A shot rings out; a body hits the ground. Someone is running.

Peggy pushes Steve away, shooting to her feet and taking off in hot pursuit of a tall, suit-clad man. Unbalanced, Steve smacks his palms against the floor so avoid introducing it to his face. He finds the body by accident; it gives under his hands, groaning in pain.

It’s Erskine.

There are more shots echoing down from the shop front, but Steve only has eyes for Erskine. Steve’s hands are too big and clumsy; he can’t seem to touch Erskine without the man producing a pained whimper. The doctor’s shirt is wet with blood, the stain spreading. His heart is weak; Steve can _hear_ it.

Dr. Abraham Erskine dies in Steve Rogers’ arms, weakly coughing up blood. He has no last words, no air to speak them. His last act is to thump Steve on the chest, right above his heart. His pupils dilate, his mouth slacks, his body relaxes. Morbidly, Steve notices how the bones of his face protrude almost comically. He’s gone. A horrid smell arises, piss and shit.

Somehow, Steve tears himself away from the body, heart pounding with loss. It brings him up short; he didn’t even know Erskine that well, and yet his loss feels so raw, so deep, as if he’d been a beloved uncle. Steve shoves past the people in his way, storms up the stairs and into the front of the shop. The clerk’s dead, too, lying where she fell, a gun next to her. He spares her no thought, jumping over the body.

Peggy’s in the middle of the road, gun aimed at the back of a speeding car. He notices every line of her, diamond cut to his new eyes. Her hair’s coming lose and she’s holding her other arm close to her side, like she’s in pain. Her next bullet takes out the rear-view window, but not the driver.

The car’s moving out of range.

Steve skids to a stop next to her, nearly bowling her over. The asphalt hurts his bare feet, little stones piercing his soles.

“Sorry!” Steve gasps.

“Blast it!” Peggy spits. She glances towards their car; it’s had its tires cut open. “ _Get him!_ ”

Steve’s too used to obeying her orders to even consider another option. He runs like the hounds of hell are on his heels.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which there is a chase and Steve gets assigned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quite a few things are different here compared to the original, but i honestly just didn't think it credible that Kruger would survive crashing the car like that, and the submarine was just... a bit too anachronistic for me.
> 
> btw! double update! this chapter and the next (the interlude).

Steve’s world narrows to a single goal.

He doesn’t know how fast he’s running, but whatever the speed, it’s fast enough to outrun several cars. His body just keeps going. His breathing is somehow steady. There is nothing but the chase. He runs down familiar streets, passes by old haunts. The city is a smelly, roaring eyesore of a beast, every sense is overworked, yet somehow his mind rejects all but the most important impressions. It doesn’t admit to the pain of running barefoot and in too small shorts, doesn’t care to process the shriek of brakes or shrillness of car horns. Instead, this is what he knows: the scent of burning rubber from the wheels on the murderer’s car; the thrum of its engine; the exact color of its paint.

Somehow that is enough.

The murderer’s manic driving has cleared a path that makes following the car much easier than it would be otherwise. It is still not by any means an easy task, however, even discounting the speed. At one point, he makes a sharp turn so suddenly that Steve, despite being a lot nimbler than a two thousand-pound vehicle, can’t twist his body in time and crashes straight through a store front.

He rolls to a stop in a mess of glass, lace, and silk.

He’s on his feet and running the second he untangles himself, hollering out excuses as he leaves. Later, he’ll be embarrassed to learn that the store was a wedding dress shop and that there’d been a bride-to-be shrieking as he took out the entire store front.

He heads in the direction of the speeding car, taking a shortcut through an alley. It turns out to be a fenced off little passage, chained and padlocked. He doesn’t stop to reconsider his route; he keeps running, pumping his arms. Around twenty feet from the fence, he leaps and prays.

He surges over it, clearing it by a wide margin. The landing isn’t too bad either, even if it does take a whole lot of skin off both his feet and knees. He gets up. It hurts. He’s had worse. _Keep moving_.

They’re close by the docks. The driver tries to  head north through a more trafficked area filled with trucks and laborers and is forced to slow his flight. Steve nearly gets run over a few times. It is yet another thing Bucky can never know about.

The heavy flow of traffic does have its upsides. Steve finally catches up to the getaway car, jumping onto the back of it and scrambling onto the roof. The car swerves wildly, throwing him from side to side before the driver steadies his course once more. Steve clings to the roof like a baby monkey on the back of its mother. He raises his hand to punch through the window—

There’s a bang.

Steve flinches with pain. God, the _pain_. There’s a bullet in his shoulder. It’s such a strange sensation; on one hand, he’s too keyed up to care, on the other too hurt to move. Moving makes the bullet press at his muscles _from the inside_. It’s actually closer to his chest than his shoulder, but near the armpit—close to a major artery, as they’ll later find when they dig it out. _Had worse_. _Keep moving_.

He uncurls.

The driver stomps on the brake, sending Steve skidding from the roof and sliding down street. This disturbs the bullet, sending another spike of pain through him. The fall tears his shirt and pants, grit embedding into his skin. Somehow, it’s also the thing that make the elastic at the waist of his shorts burst and lets him breathe a little. _Had worse._ He still has his trousers on; _keep moving_.

He stumbles to his feet, dizzy with pain. His ears ring with the rush of blood. His mouth tastes like smoke and iron. The sun is bright, the sky grey. His body aches. He takes off after the car, ignoring his body’s instinctive need to hobble. There’s no time to be wounded.  

The car isn’t hard to find, having left a trail of small traffic accidents in its wake. It’s parked haphazardly down by the gate to the offloading area of the docks, door open, the driver gone. One of the wheels has been punctured, rendering the car useless. Steve runs past it and into the loading area.

Somebody is shrieking. A group of women—wives of the dockworkers and secretarial staff—appear around the corner. One lady in particular is screaming her head off, fear and desperation painted on her face as she tries to escape from the women holding her back. She’s calling for her son, her boy, _my child_! _Don’t hurt my child!_

Ahead, the driver stands with his pistol aimed at Steve. He’s got the young boy clutched to his side in a cruel grip. The kid, no more than ten or so, is trying to twist away, resembling a distraught kitten caught in a piece of string.

The driver points the gun at the boy’s head. Steve comes to a skidding stop, hands raised. “Wait, don’t! Don’t!” The driver bares his teeth, swings the pistol back towards Steve. He pulls the trigger twice.

The first shot sends a bullet streaking past Steve’s chest. It only misses him because he’s twisted out of the way. The second shot—the gun is empty. It’s only a click.

Desperation now coloring the driver’s eyes, he throws the boy into the water and runs. Steve runs for the boy, the screeching mother on his heels.

“Go! I can swim!” the boy calls up at them when he sees Steve poking his head out from the dock. The mother doesn’t listen, flings herself into the water and starts swimming. They’ll be fine—shaken, but fine.

The docks are a labyrinth of alleyways created by wooden shipping boxes, unused ship parts, and parked trucks. Despite being surrounded by the water on one side and a fence on the other, there’s a hundred places the murderer can hide if Steve loses sight of him.

Desperate not to do so, Steve sprints after him, head down like a charging bull. The driver’s no match for him, even running on adrenaline. As Steve comes up quickly behind him, he, too, seems to realize this.

He stumbles to a stop, turns to look at Steve. He’s a handsome man, tall, aristocratic almost. Pale eyes brim with exhaustion. His breaths come heavy and fast. A cornered dog baring its teeth one last time; he knows there’s no running away.

“Hail HYDRA,” he gasps, chewing down on something.

When Steve tackles him, he’s already convulsing.

*

The murderer’s real name is Heinz Kruger, but he’d gained access to Project Rebirth via his fake identity as Fred Clemson. He’d had a job at the State Department, seemingly a hardworking patriot with the skills and patience to rise quickly through the ranks. Through his cover he’d encountered a certain Senator Brandt—one of the main backers for the project, in fact; the man with the hungry eyes. Colonel Phillips had nearly exploded at that little piece of information, but no one else had suspected a thing either, which lends some credence to the senator’s innocence.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Erskine is dead.

Someone has covered his body with a sheet, the blood seeping through at the chest. All around the body, glass and plaster lies like ugly confetti. The smell is somehow even worse, making Steve’s eyes water as he’s led through the lab towards a medical suite (really an office, but it’s the best they’ve got right now). Other than Erskine, everybody else is largely unhurt. Peggy had taken some damage, but that was mostly from Steve throwing her down when the bomb blew (a fact that he apologizes for profusely, but she waves his words away and calls them even).

Now, he perches on a table with nurses milling around him.

Anger still smolders in his chest, but abashment looms as well. He hadn’t been able to tell them much when he returned emptyhanded and has been summarily dismissed. It’s a familiar feeling, being sent away. _Don’t let it get to you._ The bullet’s being drawn out by one of the white coats from the lab. Steve’s not even sure he’s a real doctor. It hurts almost as badly as when it went in. Then it’s blood sample after blood sample after blood sample; maybe he’ll have about as much blood in him as Erskine’s body when they’re done. _Fuck, that’s morbid._

Finally, Peggy comes to fetch him, freeing him from the clutches of the “doctor” who’d been starting to look a bit too fascinated in Steve’s humble opinion. Peggy’s arm is secured in a sling, but at least she doesn’t seem bothered by it. “I’m sorry you had to go through that,” she tells him as they make their escape. “But Erskine didn’t write his work down. Any hope of reproducing the serum and get that bloody army they’re all up in arms about is locked in your genetic code. Not that that won’t take years without him.”

“He made notes, though,” Steve says, thinking of Isaiah Bradley.

Peggy smiles grimly. “Which he read and re-read until he remembered everything, then destroyed the papers. His rooms have already been searched, there’s nothing there but ashes.” She sighs. “At least he’d be proud it was you.”

_At least the serum worked for something more than just making a soldier_.

Steve feels… reborn. There’s no other word for it. The skin around the bullet wound has been sutured, of course, but even then, he can feel the sharp tingle as it mends; his lungs are so clear, as if he’ll never cough again. His heart beats a steady thump, almost rocking him with its strength. He can hear and see so many things now, distinguish little details he never could before. The color of Peggy’s hair, the exact timbre of Phillips’ voice.

Speaking of Phillips’ voice, it’s the first thing that reaches them as they enter the lab. The colonel seems to have calmed down some, no longer cussing at everyone, though he’s still interrogating Senator Brandt with extreme prejudice. Off to the side, poking at his machines with a moue of feigned disinterest is Mr. Stark. The second Steve enters the room, the man’s eyes fix on him. It is a severely unnerving experience; Steve makes sure not to meet his gaze.

“But who’d have enough influence to get a spy into the State Department?” Senator Brandt is saying.

“HYDRA.” Colonel Phillips spits the word from between clenched teeth. It’s clearly not the first time he’s said it. “Their threat has been included in our briefings for months now, _Senator_.”

“I’m on a number of committees, _Colonel_ ,” Brandt reminds him in a snide, self-important tone.

Peggy steps forward. “HYDRA is the Nazi deep science division. It’s led by Dr. Johann Schmidt, the first recipient of Erskine’s serum—luckily, an unfinished version.”

“It’s still made him godlike in the eyes of his followers, HYDRA’s practically a cult by now,” Phillips adds sourly. “They think he’s invincible. Reports from the front indicate there might be some truth to it.”

“So, what are you gonna do about it?” Brandt asks.

Colonel Phillips draws himself up to his full height. He’s not a particularly tall man, but he’s imposing in a way that commands respect. “Spoke to the president this morning. As of today, the SSR is being re-tasked. We’re taking the fight to HYDRA.” He turns to Peggy. “Pack your bags, Agent Carter. You, too, Stark! You’re flying to London tonight.”

Mr. Stark tips his head to indicate he’s heard the order, but his eyes are still on Steve.

As Phillips moves to leave, Steve intercepts him. “Sir, if you’re going after Schmidt, I want in.” It’s what he’s been made for. He’s ready.

But Phillips scoffs. “You’re a science experiment, Rogers. You’re going to Alamogordo.”

_What?_ “The serum worked!”

Phillips has no mercy. “I asked for an army and all I got was you. You are not enough.”

He leaves Steve standing there with his mouth gaping open like a fish, purposeless again. Isn’t one supersoldier better than no supersoldier when you’re going up against… whatever Schmidt is? Steve’s finally fit for duty and he’s _still_ not enough? What does he have to do to be accepted? Conquer death?

At that moment, Senator Brandt ambles up to him. That hungry gleam is back in his eyes, and his voice is all honey. “With all due respect to the Colonel, I think we may be missing the point. What you did when that man made a run for it—I’ve never seen anything like it. The _country’s_ never seen anything like it. But I bet you that by tomorrow, you’re all they can talk about—the dockside rescue, in particular. The enlistment lines will reach around the block, I tell you!” His hand lands on Steve’s shoulder, squeezing. It feels like a grope. “You don’t take a soldier, a symbol, like that and hide him in a lab.”

Steve wants to shrug him off, but he’s also burning with curiosity. “I’m not sure what you’re suggesting?”

Another smile, this one full of teeth. “Son, do you want to serve your country on the most important battlefield of the war?”

“Sir, that’s all I want.”

Steve will finally go to war.


	9. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which there is an unread letter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a double-update! this chapter and the last one were posted within, like, minutes of one another.

It takes a few days to get Steve ready for his new mission. Most of the formalities are handled by Brandt’s people—such as locking down his and Bucky’s apartment, which is to be held in trust for them as part of his and Brandt’s agreement, and packing up the few things he’ll be taking with him, a few sketchbooks and pencils and such. Steve doesn’t get to go back to Brooklyn himself, doesn’t get to say goodbye to the Barneses or his neighbors. At least he’s allowed to write them too-short, not-at-all satisfying letters and have them delivered. They just say he’s got a job to do, he’ll be back, don’t worry, he’s fine, take care.

But his own letters are not the ones that should have worried him.

As Brandt’s people are leaving the apartment, another letter gets delivered. It’s mistakenly handed to one of the neighbors and thus the men don’t get to collect it. The neighbor, unsure what to do, slides it under the door to Steve and Bucky’s apartment and forgets all about it.

Steve doesn’t get to read it. Not yet. Not until almost seventy years later—and by then it’ll be almost too much to bear. Instead, the letter gathers dust in the apartment as the days turn to months turn to years. In 1945, after Steve goes down in the ice and is presumed dead, Howard Stark will buy the apartment and find the letter.

It’ll end up in the Smithsonian.

That’s where Steve’ll read it when time comes, displayed in a case for the Captain America exhibition. The plaque next to it will read _Letter from Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes to Captain Steven Grant Rogers, April 22nd 1943. Delivered via Victory Mail to their shared apartment in Brooklyn on the day Captain Rogers departed for his USO tour. The letter was never read by its intended recipient._

It’ll be quite the attraction. Numerous academics will base their reading of Steve and Bucky’s friendship on it—and countless others will be baffled that it made it through the censors.

It’s written on rough, tan paper in a neat hand that starts getting messy halfway through, as if Bucky had been shaking when he wrote it. The first time Steve sees it, it’ll be frayed but otherwise surprisingly well-preserved.

It reads:

 

_Dear Steve,_

_London is everything we always thought even if the war has disrupted it. It’s so old, Steve, you can’t imagine what it’s like on the streets. I feel like a child again. The people are kind. They keep busy. I wasn’t there for long, but I liked what I did see. Me and the guys had drink at a pub in Westminster with a group of English soldiers from the Parachute Brigade. Fine men, you’d like them, especially this one fella—he’s just as sarcastic as you, punk._

_And this fella, Steve, when he got real drunk, he spouted poetry and lost all that careful enunciation and started sounding more like your ma than an Englishman—the other fellas really made fun of him for that. Fucking depressing stuff he recited, you couldn’t get him to stop again. It was a relief getting our orders, I can’t stand sitting around listening to it._

_But, Steve, one of those damn poems_

_~~I didn’t~~ _

_~~It~~ _

_I couldn’t remember it at first. And now there’s a part of it I can’t forget. I was out in the trench, everything was so noisy, ~~I couldn’t think with the~~_

_I keep hearing it at night now. Not all of it, just parts. Fuck if I can remember what it’s called or who wrote it. I just hear that fella’s voice, as if he’s whispering right outside my tent, and then it becomes my voice, and I speak both voices in the poem, I speak it to myself and at myself ~~and when I wake up I don’t recognize~~_

_It’s like I’m two people. I’m the speaker and the specter both. But only the specter’s words remain in my head. I know it isn’t me, it’s the poem, ~~but I don’t~~_

_God, this fucking poem, Steve. Why can’t I forget it?_

A few lines of half-written verse follow, as if Bucky had tried and failed to write the poem down properly with line breaks and everything. It’s half-erased, as if he’d gotten frustrated and stopped trying to record it. The letter returns to musings about Bucky’s parents, about Steve’s health and happenings, and finally ends with _Stay safe, punk. Don’t pick up any stupid now. Bucky._ A historian will identify the poem from the few broken verses and add it in full below the letter in a handsome print by the time Steve sees it. They’ll even have bolded the parts that Bucky had been trying to recall:

 

“Strange Meeting”. Wilfred Owen, c. 1918.

 

_It seemed that out of battle I escaped_

_Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped_

_Through granites which titanic wars had groined._

_Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,_

_Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred._

_Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared_

_With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,_

_Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless._

_And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—_

_By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell._

_With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;_

_Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,_

_And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan._

_“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”_

_“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,_

_The hopelessness. **Whatever hope is yours,**_

**_Was my life also; I went hunting wild_ **

**_After the wildest beauty in the world,_ **

**_Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,_ **

**_But mocks the steady running of the hour,_ **

**_And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here._ **

_For by my glee might many men have laughed,_

_And **of my weeping something had been left,**_

**_Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,_ **

**_The pity of war, the pity war distilled._ **

**_Now men will go content with what we spoiled._ **

**_Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled._ **

_They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress._

_None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress._

**_Courage was mine, and I had mystery;_ **

**_Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:_ **

_To miss the march of this retreating world_

_Into vain citadels that are not walled._

_Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,_

_I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,_

_Even with truths that lie too deep for taint._

_I would have poured my spirit without stint_

_But not through wounds; not on the cess of war._

_Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were._

**_“I am the enemy you killed, my friend._ **

**_I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned_ **

**_Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed._ **

**_I parried; but my hands were loath and cold._ **

_Let us sleep now. . . .”_

 

Steve’ll hear it when he goes to sleep, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> War Poetry from WWI is one of the rawest, most astounding forms of poetry and I love it dearly. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon have had a huge influence on how I understand the nature of war in the modern age (and prob also the post-modern age).


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve is feeling himself. Literally.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rating goes up now!  
> NSFW: masturbation and fantasizing about your best friend.
> 
> this chapter is a long one, i don't know what happened

Steve’s first time was a bit of a mess, to be honest. He was clumsy, his voice kept cracking due to nerves, he had to have props to help him remember what to do and what to say, and all along it seemed as if everybody else knew what to do. When it was over, he was sweaty, mentally exhausted, and still wracked with residual anxiety. He’d almost turned around and walked right out, damn it all to hell and back.

But he’s gotten used to the stage now.

Gone are the days of his lines being taped to the back of his prop shield; no longer does his tongue tangle from alliterations and rhymes; the costume seems to itch less and less. He’s even stopped feeling awkward when filming the propaganda reels where he declares that _each bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy’s gun!_ He feels so stupid spouting that, even more so with all the rest of the preaching. And it _is_ preaching; even if he himself believes around half the things coming out of his mouth, he can’t shake the feeling that if it weren’t for the money, he wouldn’t be allowed to say a thing at all. If you only encourage bravery and justice when it benefits you directly, are you really encouraging anything except lining your own pockets?

He doesn’t like doing it, but he soldiers through it. It’s is the only soldiering he’s doing.

When Brandt had promised him that he’d serve his country this wasn’t what Steve had in mind. Rather than dirt and mud, his battlefield is wooden boards and filmsets, his fellow soldiers a troupe of chorus girls and musicians and of course the short guy playing Hitler. His commanding officer is Brandt’s aide—or Brandt himself when he can be bothered to show up, something that happens less and less as the USO tour takes them farther and farther from New York.

Steve had always known that he’d have to work harder than almost anyone else to prove himself. He thought he’d made the first steps when Erskine’s serum worked, and then again when Brandt swooped in. This isn’t the outcome he imagined.

He doesn’t regret it, though. At least he’s doing something, _anything_. He’s almost started liking the goddamn song they sing and dance to—if that’s not a sign that he’s too far gone he doesn’t know what is. It’s not collecting scrap or working in a factory, it’s not sitting at home waiting for Bu—

Point is… Steve doesn’t know what the point is. It’s fine.

It’s fine even when he’s fleeing the masses of people wanting him to sign posters and tickets. It’s fine when people shove their kids into his arms and ask him to smile. It’s fine when girls look him up and down in a manner that makes him flush all over.  

It’s fine. He can handle it.

Even better, tonight is his last performance on this leg of the tour; he doesn’t know where they’ll be heading after, and while he’d normally worry about this, for now he’s just done. Him: Steve Rogers. The guy who _could_ _do this all day_. But this isn’t fighting. He needs a break.

Even better, there’s a little something waiting for him in his room tonight and he’s been anxious for it all month. Namely: some fucking time alone.

But first: the stage.

He shares a cramped dressing room with Hector, the guy who plays Hitler. They can just about sit down and get ready at the same time without bumping elbows. Steve’s already in costume and trying to get his hair to lie flat, a rather pointless task as it’ll be all sweaty from the stage lights, but it’s routine and settles him. His costume is… a bit of an insult to his artistic sensibilities.

When he’s on stage, he’s not Steve Rogers: he’s Captain America, patron of America and her soldiers, and by God will he be dressed like Lady Liberty herself came down from her pedestal, rolled him in the American flag and stuffed him into a pair of bright, red, lurid boots. On the list of things that are awful about the costume these are the most pressing: the winged cowl that sags weirdly around his jaw and makes his head look diamond-shaped from certain angles; the stiff, clumsy, red gloves that match the damn boots; the short blue shorts that keep gathering up around his thighs; and last but not least, the blue nylons. They aren’t uncomfortable, they’re just… the first time he put them on he looked himself in the mirror and saw how they highlighted every bump and swell, he promptly burst into flames of embarrassment.

Maybe he should be thankful for the shorts. At least they cover more than the nylons.

Having flattened his hair for the fiftieth time, Steve sighs and heads out. Their small dressing room lies at the end of a short hallway, somewhat removed from the rest of backstage. You don’t have to go too far to find other people, though. The area buzzes with activity as the show approaches, and the green room, his destination, isn’t far.

Most of the chorus girls have already assembled there, their costumes tiny, feminine versions of his own. Well, kind of. They’re certainly prettier than his, involving blue halter-necked tops, red-and-white striped skirts that fall just below their buttocks, and flat, blue caps.

They’d all wildly intimidated Steve when they’d first started touring, what with him unused to his body, the situations, the crowd, everything. They were all so beautiful, and he’d itched to draw each and every one of them—he’s actually done a fair few portraits by now, as the initial discomfort had worn off and they all fell into a pattern.

Still, he isn’t sure how to relax around most of them, and they don’t quite seem to know what to do with him either. There’d been more than a few awkward moments at the start, some rather direct offers had been made to divest him of his loneliness. Steve had flushed and turned them down each and every time. He’d feared it would make touring awful, but to his surprise the girls were all fairly adept at handling rejection and carried on as if nothing was amiss.

It made everything a lot easier, but then they had learned from personal experience with actors and managers that were just a little too handsy (some more than that). Every single one of the girls knows the value of the word “no”, even if they are not always extended the same courtesy _._ It makes Steve hot with anger and sick with sympathy, but he can’t do anything about it. Instead, he’s always extra courteous and even uses his size to his advantage when it comes to fellas getting too familiar after the shows. The girls don’t thank him, but they don’t need to. Their postures ease when he’s around and that’s enough.  

As a result, he’s not really bonded with any of them, nor with the musicians, a largely male crew who are all intimidated by him _._ Mostly, the girls treat him like an over-large kid brother, or maybe a puppy. Steve’s embarrassed to say it, but it’s actually a relief.

He finds a lonesome corner of the green room and sits down on an uncomfortable stool, back to the wall. Though he’s wearing a spangly costume and stands almost a foot taller than everyone else when he’s on his feet, Steve still blends in well with the wall when he wants to. Having been on the road for so long, it’s the most isolated he can be. He’s always sharing space with someone else, any personal time being the ten minutes it takes to shower. He’d never known he could feel so hemmed in, what with having lived like he used to back in Brooklyn. He and Bucky had slept in the same room for years and Steve’s never needed space. Now, he’s close to bursting.

It’s twenty minutes to go-time and for once no one comes calling for him. He can just settle in and watch. The girls flutter about, laughing and teasing one another, much more at ease with being on the road than he. Almost automatically, his eyes settle on two girls in particular.

Mae and Lizzy are incredibly lovely women. They’re both brunettes, but whereas Lizzy’s hair is naturally curly and bouncy, Mae’s hair is so straight she needs an hour more in the make-up chair just to her hair right. There’s a self-assured air to the way they move and a familiarity that Steve’s rarely seen outside of a married couple. As he’s looking, Lizzy leans into Mae, eyes sparkling with delight at whatever Mae’s speaking about. Their hands are touching, not much, just a few fingers overlapping, bodies curving into parentheses as if they’ve got a secret to protect between them.

It makes Steve ache with loneliness even while he longs to be alone.

*

It’s been eighty years (more like four months) but Steve finally has a few hours alone. Hector, whom he usually shares a room with, has finally left to meet up with his wife who lives in the state and won’t be back until tomorrow.

When the show had ended, Steve had through the motions with more and more urgency. He’d met a blur of people who’d all wanted him to be like he was on stage; an upstanding strongman with little more between his ears except notions of American greatness and a deep and abiding wish for the common man and woman to do their part for the war effort. That is: buying defense bonds to support their troops. Then he’d had to sit through a meeting with Brandt who’d kept hinting at something all the way through their conversation but only followed up with “we’re still waiting for the papers to be in order, so I can’t say anything just yet, but it’ll be very profitable for us all!”

Now, he’s finally alone.

He’s not even changed out of his uniform or showered, wanting to do so in private and spend as much time as he could on his own. He’d practically sprinted from the office, eager and shaking with how badly he’d wanted it.

The medium-sized hotel room is quiet. It’s almost a pity that Hector’s elected to stay with his wife for the night, it’s the first time they have accommodations that are good rather than just acceptable. _Almost_ a pity, except not really; Steve will take whatever good fortune comes his way at this point.

He goes to the bedroom and sits down on the bed, rolling his neck slowly to release tension. He doesn’t really get achy anymore, not from the show at least, not even from lifting a motorcycle and three chorus girls over his head at the same time.

Reluctant to hurry but almost desperate with the need to come back to himself from this caricature of a person he’s become, he begins.

The boots are easy to get off, you just grab the heel and pull. He flexes his toes, his ankles, working out the stiffness. Then the gloves, disgustingly sticky around his sweaty fingers. The cowl is next, sliding back from his face and making his hair stick up in every direction; he runs his fingers through it, scratching at the scalp. It sends shivers down his spine.

Steve hasn’t touched or been touched by another person in any way that equated tender since Bucky left. He’d never have thought it could affect him so badly, but even this the serum appears to have magnified.

He slips his belt loose, the buckle jingling loudly in the empty room. The top half of his costume is a slightly cumbersome garment, too tight to be easily put on or taken off. It makes him feel like a snake shedding its skin, as if the fabric has attached itself to his body. It takes his undershirt with it as it comes off; he has to detangle his arms from the sleeves.

He stands, shaking out his limbs, loosening up his shoulders. He pulls at the barely-there legs of the shorts, then unbuttons them and slides them off. He’s left in the nylons.

They’re probably not _real_ nylons, or at least Steve doesn’t think so. Probably more like the hosiery used by circus acrobats, but he doesn’t know the right terminology for those, so he just calls them nylons in his head. He peels them off slowly, careful not to tear them; there’s a shortage of stockings and the like, and he doesn’t want to add to the such a burden. Besides, there’s a slight… thrill to stepping out of them, like he’s doing something illicit. Men don’t wear nylons—even if these are made for men and thus more… roomy than a dame’s.

But a hundred thousand people has seen him in them. More than half of those have ogled him walking around the stage. Even alone in his room, it feels like all those eyes are still on him, their gaze greedily devouring the body that science created. It makes undressing feel more daring, like a tease or an unveiling. He imagines that a bride might feel like this on her wedding night and shivers, seeing himself in her place.

Finally, he drops his briefs and is naked.

Even to his own nose he smells stale and sweaty, so he heads for the shower. It’s a tiny little bathroom, but at least it’s private, so it doesn’t bother him over much. He’s had worse at home. Before the serum, he’d have fit quite comfortably, but now he keeps bumping into the curtain; it sticks to his wet skin, peels off like a kiss.

It’d taken him months to come to terms with his body. At first, it’d seemed like it reacted independently of his mind, his movements too jerky as a result. It’d been even more obvious while they’d trained for the show, how puppet-like he walked and waved as if a string was being pulled. Even now, when it’s started feeling like _his_ body rather than _a_ body, some things still trip him up, especially unconscious movements like moving out of the way when someone is trying to pass him; he moves too fast then, turns with too much force, as if he were still less than a hundred pounds and slender enough to flatten himself against the wall completely.

Touching himself with familiarity has taken even longer to learn.

It’s not sexual—well, it’s not _entirely_ sexual. Steve will admit that he’s done his fair share of exploration whenever he’s gotten a moment alone, quickly taking care of himself in the shower where he can bite his lip and get off and not be heard over the sound of water. Luckily, if you can call it that, his body being this new had had him on a bit of a hair-trigger in the first many, many weeks, and it’d been over quickly.

But now he’s got all the time in the world, no one to observe his curious hands or his helpless noises, and fuck if he isn’t going to take advantage of it.

He’s never quite touched himself like this before. First, he’d lived with his Ma and the walls were thin, so everything was done very, _very_ quietly. Then there’d been Bucky, and it’d been done fast and just as quietly while Bucky slept.

He imagines it’s like touching a lover for the first time, not that he knows enough of lovers to truly connect the two.

With the water beating down, he soaps up his hands. He scrubs them clean, curls his fingers towards his palms and lets his nails scratch against skin that was once calloused. His hands are both familiar and foreign; he’s always had bigger hands for his small frame, so they aren’t quite so strange as the rest of him even if they’ve grown broader.

He flexes his wrists; the bone protrudes slightly, almost gracefully now that he isn’t quite so thin. There’s a lot more hair on his forearms than there ever were before, his legs too; his chest hair, however, has completely vanished. There hadn’t been much, just a small patch, but it’d counted a lot when he couldn’t even grow a beard. Nowadays, he needs to shave every morning.

He runs his hands over his arms, over the swell and dip of muscle. His shoulders are mountainous, wide and strong. He’s almost a little busty, and it feels good to cup himself, almost a little shameful. He’s heard guys talk about how a dame’s breasts just fit in their palms; he imagines they’d be softer than he is. Would dames be as breathless from a touch as he is? He thinks they might; he’s heard enough stories, from Bucky even. Why would women want to have sex if it didn’t also feel good for them?  

He’s hard but he ignores it. There’s no need to hurry.

His belly is sculpted as that of a Greek statue, his hips carved as if from marble. He digs his nails in and draws red lines from his thighs and upwards, scratches that’ll fade in minutes.

Already overloaded with impressions, he goes back to washing his hair, trying to draw it out. He almost succeeds in delaying himself, but the second the soap’s gone from his scalp, massaged through his hair by strong fingers, he dips downward again. Not straight down though; he lingers on his face, feels for the familiar lines to ground himself. His nose is just as beaky as it’s always been, his cheekbones sharp (though not as sharp as Bucky’s; Steve’s always noticed those). His jaw feels more natural now, as if his bones have finally settled, and his lips are a little dry. He licks them and moves on.

He glides his hands down his chest, past his belly, around to the small of his back. There’s a thrill to putting his hands around himself like that, almost as if it’s another person skimming their fingers over his skin while they inspect him. Would they be pleased? Would B—

He continues down, bending to reach. His thighs are sturdy, tree trunk-like, but his legs are long and almost elegant. The backs of his knees are sensitive. He skims through the hair on his calves, still unused to the sensation. He goes back up, diggings his nails in as he reaches the front of his thighs. The brief, sharp pain sings through him.

He’s starting to pant.

Steve turns the water off and dries off, then heads to the bedroom.

After his slow exploration in the shower, the bedsheets feel scratchy and intense on his skin. They smell heavily of laundry powder, which is better than dust at least. The air is almost cool now, making his nipples pebble.

He looks down.

He has not grown—well, okay, he has. His cock wasn’t always this size, but it’s not grown to… he’s just proportionate, that’s all. It fits the rest of his body. And given that he’s kind of big all over, well. He might be a little big, but nothing like you’d see in the really dirty bluesies. He fits in his hand the same as he always has.

His first touches are featherlight; he doesn’t want to come too fast, not now that he has all eternity. Maybe he can go more than once, though? He hasn’t tried before, but he’s been more than half-hard even after having come all the other times, so maybe? Maybe tonight.

It’s weird, looking down at his hand like this, too alien still, as if he disconnects from himself rather than finding his way back. He closes his eyes.

Back in Brooklyn, he’d thought about all sorts of things while touching himself, even things he’s not too proud of in the light of day—like the way young Mrs. Addams down the hall had seemed to swell right out of her shirt when she got pregnant, how some of the dockworkers shone with sweat on hot summer days, how a dame’s dress would wave about her legs when she danced, sometimes showing the edges of stockings. Those were the things he’d shared with Bucky—though the dockworker story had been modified to be the glistening shoulders of girls in their bathing suits. The thing that really got him, the fantasy he kept close, was Bucky. Always Bucky, always eager.

After these long months, he’s had new thoughts to turn to. One of the first ones was the color of Peggy’s lipstick. He’d been in the shower, hand picking up speed as the color flashed before his eyes, her lips tipping into a sly smile, and then the smile had been Bucky’s and Bucky had worn the lipstick and Steve had thought of smushing it with his own lips and the stain had transferred and smudged around both their mouths and he’d come all over himself, almost whining with want.

Tonight, he doesn’t try to obscure his thoughts by starting off elsewhere. He knows how to imagine the exact feel of the hand on his cock, has felt it curled against his cheek and cuffed around his neck. He knows how Bucky’s nose scrunches when he laughs, wants to see it when he’s above Steve, naked and straddling him and wanting Steve as much as Steve wants him. Bucky is always kissing him in his fantasies, always touching him. It’s never _just_ fucking, though there’s plenty of that. It’s always tender, always overwhelming.

Sometimes the thought of the two of them together had strayed into Steve’s mind when Bucky had been right across from him and he’d blushed and Bucky had teased him.

Would he tease him in bed? Would he let Steve touch him, trembling with want and need, or would he hold his wrists above his head and tell him to be patient? Would he let Steve kiss him, map every inch of skin and every scar with love? Bucky’s always a little scruffy in the mornings and nights, what would his stubble feel like against his tongue? Would Bucky ride him sweetly, patiently, as he told Steve how good it was?

Or would he spread Steve’s legs and make himself at home, fingers dancing down and into him? Would he rejoice in the moans and _please_ s that fell from Steve’s lips like prayers, or would he tell him to hold them in and to be good and bite him on the neck?

It’s at that thought, the thought of Bucky’s teeth in him, fingers slick and clever, Bucky’s mark and claim and love, and Steve’s done for. With a cry, he comes, cock kicking in his grip and come painting his skin.

He lies panting, heart beating right out of his chest. He misses Bucky and misses him and misses him and misses him. His name is on the tip of his tongue, his smell haunts Steve’s mind like a ghost, musky cologne and sweat and home.

Steve is still hard. He still _wants_.

He gets back to it.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve reaches Italy and a bad day gets worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is quite close to the movie, but with some changes. i google mapped the shit out of these distances (let's pretend they are very accurate, yeah?) and thus they differ a lot from the movie.

“How many of you are ready to help me sock ol’ Adolf on the jaw?” Steve calls to the gathered soldiers sitting in front of the hastily erected stage in a make-shift military camp somewhere south of Rome.

Those big news Brandt had been all a-flutter about? _We’re heading to Italy, Rogers! Didn’t I tell ya I’d get ya to the front?_ Well, some five miles south of the front, at least. Thus Steve, the girls, and Hector had spent weeks at sea, growing ever more restless as the shores of war came closer and closer.

With every mile they put behind them, Steve found his heart pulled back to Brooklyn. Back to home, back to their shitty apartment, back to the smell of sweat and trash and summer heat. But at the same time, heading _towards_ a fight is all he’s ever known. This is just the next step. This time, the fight might actually change something, might actually do some good in the long run.

And now they’re here.

It’s the tail end of the Italian fall. The weather’s poor, and the audience is clearly unenthusiastic. Steve tries not to let it get to him; the chorus girls had gotten a nice enough welcome when they’d introduced him, the men all hooting and hollering like baboons. You’d think they hadn’t seen a woman in years. War doesn’t discriminate between genders when it comes to staffing, though—and it’s not just nurses and secretaries, there are quite a few female soldiers, too.

Steve just has to get through the show as usual, without all the pomp and circumstance the last couple of shows had afforded them back in the states—the fireworks, the waving flags, the confetti. He’s not even going to do his sales pitch; these men aren’t going to be buying bonds. It’ll be just a short spiel for morale, get a bit of a laugh, fake-punch Hector when he comes sneaking out from side-stage in his Nazi get-up. Easy-peasy, Steve’s done it hundreds of times.

_Clearly Bucky didn’t take all the stupid with him when he left._

It’s almost as if the soldiers are growing unhappier the longer they have to look at Steve’s spangly costume and professional smile.

“Okay,” he says when the deafening silence has reigned for too long. “Uh… I need a volunteer?” _Don’t phrase it like a question, dumbass, at least pretend you know how to do this!_

“I already volunteered! How do you think I got here!” one of the soldiers yell from somewhere in the crowd. The rest of the men laugh, the first reaction Steve has gotten so far.

He forces a chuckle, tries to rally—

“ _Bring back the girls!_ ” another roars, setting off a round of raucous cheering.

Steve glances towards the stage entrance. Some of the girls are keeping an eye on him from there; Mae gesticulates to keep him going, brows raised in encouragement. “I think they only know the one song,” Steve stalls. The soldiers boo. “But, um—let me—I’ll-I’ll see what I can do.”

“ _You do that, sweetheart!_ ”

“ _Nice boots, Tinker Bell!_ ”

For a moment, it’s like being back in Brooklyn. He’s had both those names aimed at him before; not quite in the same situation, but it’d been in the same snide tone, and it’d always ended with a bloody nose and a raging Bucky. Few things made Bucky as mad as when fellas talked to Steve as if he were a dame.

Steve grinds his teeth, tries not to lose his temper. “Come on, guys. We’re all on the same team here.” _Don’t start a fight, don’t start a fight, don’t start a fight._

“ _Hey, Captain_!” Steve turns his head to locate the man. It’s a rough-looking guy, younger even than Steve. He’s on his feet and there’s trouble in his eyes. “ _Sign this_!” He turns and shrugs his pants down, baring his pale ass to God and fellow men.

Steve turns his gaze away so fast he practically feels the strain on his eyeballs. _Don’t start a fight._ A piece of scrap comes flying at him. He ducks behind his gaudy prop shield, and the scrap thump against it. More thumps follow, more trash, some of it grazing his legs. How the Hell is there so much shit lying around a military camp?

“ _Bring back the girls!_ ”

From the corner of his eye, Steve notices Mae getting the other girls into line, hastily waving them out and maneuvering them in front of him to stop the soldiers from chucking anything else. Their appearance causes much joy and renewed hollering from the crowd.

Mae shrugs at him as they pass one another, a small pitying smile on her face. It is _literally_ like being back in Brooklyn now.

Brandt’s aide meets him backstage. “Don’t worry, pal,” he says with the total obliviousness of authority, “they’ll warm up to you.”

_And Hell is just a little dry in the summer._

*

Around four o’clock, the dark clouds finally shed their weight, and rain starts pouring with a vengeance. Steve’s long since sought refuge beneath the awning of the empty stage and doesn’t need to move as the heavy drum of rain beats against his sanctuary.

He’s commandeered some paper from the command tent, scraps that weren’t fit for anything but doodles anyhow. It’s not exactly good paper, rough and grainy, but it’s fine for his purposes. The sketchbooks he’d brought with him all the way from Brooklyn have long since been filled as the tour progressed, the last pages disappearing on the voyage across the sea. They’re wasting away at the bottom of his bag now.

Even his pencils are down to stubs.

In the life that seems somehow decades ago, he’d have gotten stiff and achy from being still and crouched this long, but he doesn’t feel a thing now, except for a vague sense of pins-and-needles in his butt and thighs. Is he really so far gone from himself already? When Bucky had changed with his training, Steve hadn’t understood how such a short time could do so much. Now, well. Maybe there won’t be a Steve Rogers when this is all over; it’ll be Captain America, patron saint of war bonds and bad decisions.

On the paper, a monkey on a unicycle has taken shape. It’s dressed in a star-spangled uniform and carries an umbrella and a sickly-forced grin on its little monkey face. Steve would like to think his own stage-smile isn’t quite as manic, but honestly? He has his doubts.

“Hello, Steve.”

 Startled, Steve looks up.

Peggy lowers her jacket from where she’s been using it to shield her head from the rain—not completely successfully, given her damp hair and face. Despite her bedraggled appearance, Steve’s heart twists at seeing her familiar, lovely face.

“Hi,” he breathes. “What’re you doing here?”

She shrugs, an elegant, full-body movement that involves shimmying her head a little. “Officially, I’m not here at all.” She takes a seat next to him, a respectable five feet apart. Even in a warzone, she looks perfectly well-put together, a little tired from long months and a little dirty, but her lipstick’s as immaculate as ever. “That was quite a performance.”

 _Jesus Christ, you saw that?_ The only thing worse would be Bucky seeing it. “Yeah, uh… I had to improvise a little bit. The crowds I’m used to are usually more… uh… twelve-year-olds and housewives.”

She smirks at him; it makes his guts roll all funny, makes him think of spring days spent being taught how to fight like a wildcat. “I understand you’re ‘America’s new hope’?”

“Bond sales take a ten percent bump in every state we go to.” He’s not bitter. He’s _not_.

“Is that Senator Brandt I hear?” Peggy asks with exaggerated surprise, looking around as if to spot the man himself lurking underneath the stage.

Steve can’t help but be a little resentful. He doesn’t mind that Peggy’s doing this, doing more than he ever will. He doesn’t begrudge her the guts she’s had to show to get to this point. But. Well. What he wouldn’t give to be in her shoes. “At least he’s got me doing this. Phillips would have had me stuck in a lab,” he finally says.

“And these are your only two options? A lab rat or a dancing monkey?” She glances at his drawing; her gaze is sharp, keen and pitiless as always. “You were meant for more than this, you know.”

“Because of Erskine?”

“No. Because of you.”

Steve flushes. That’s probably the nicest thing a dame has ever said to him, superseding even _you’re actually sort of handsome in the sunlight,_ as said by the only girl who’s ever kissed him. 

He opens his mouth, closes it again, wordless.

“What?” Peggy prompts.

He sucks in a breath. “You know… for the longest time, I dreamed about coming overseas and being on the front lines. Serving my country, doing my part. I finally get what I wanted. And I’m wearing nylons.”

Whatever Peggy’s about to say in return gets interrupted by the honk of a large truck, skidding slightly in the mud as it comes to a stop. The driver and another man scramble from the cab, heading for the back. A small group of wounded and battered soldiers stumble out, some barely able to walk, a few completely delirious with either pain or medicine.

It’s Steve’s first intimate look at the horrors of war, but in the end he’ll have seen much worse and he’ll barely remember this. “They look like they’ve been through Hell.” He scans the men; none are familiar. _Thank God_. He doesn’t know what he would do if he saw Bucky like that.

“These men more than most,” Peggy admits, jaw set with a soldier’s refusal to pity their fellow men. “Schmidt sent out a force from Azzano. We weren’t supposed to be up there, it’s too far behind enemy lines, but orders are orders. Two hundred men against a small HYDRA formation and only fifty returned. This camp, your audience—they’re what’s left of the one-oh-seventh, the rest were—” Steve grabs her arm, cutting her off.

He can’t breathe. “The one-oh-seventh?”

Peggy eyes him warily. “Yes?”

He’s up and running. _Bucky._

*

The command center is set up in a tent somewhat in the middle of base. It’s a rather neat area with people bustling to-and-fro even in this weather. Surprisingly—if Steve could feel any surprise at this moment—it’s Colonel Phillips’ face that greets them when Steve comes stomping in, Peggy on his heels. Steve hadn’t known Phillips was here. No one tells him a goddamned fucking thing.

The colonel eyes him with the same blunt disgruntlement that has been permanently settled on his face for as long as Steve’s known him. “Well, if it isn’t the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan,” he says with a sing-song quality, like he, too, has been bamboozled by the catchiness of Steve’s damn theme song. “And what is your plan today?” he adds in a tone that distinctly communicates _it better be to turn and walk out and stop bothering me._  

Steve doesn’t give a single fuck. “I need the casualty list from Azzano.” _Calm down, calm down, calm down, he might be safe, he might be here,_ but Bucky hadn’t been at the show or else there’d been a brawl the second someone started yelling at Steve. Not that he knows Steve is Captain America, Steve’s never told him in any of the letters he’s sent to the front. But it’s _Bucky_. He’d know Steve anywhere, mindless and blind even.

Phillips’ expression darkens even further. “You don’t get to give me orders, son.”

“I just need one name,” Steve pleads. He’s not above begging, not anymore. “Sergeant James Barnes from the hundred and seventh, please, sir.”

“You and I are gonna have a conversation later that you won’t enjoy,” Phillips informs Peggy with a reproachful gesture.

“ _Please_ , just tell me if he’s alive, sir. It’s B-A-R—”

“I can spell,” Phillips interrupts. He folds his hands in front of him, drawing up his shoulders as if trying to appear at parade rest even while sitting down. He doesn’t look at any of the papers on the desk, nor does he flinch from Steve’s desperate gaze. That, more than his words, has Steve’s heart sinking fast. “I have signed more of these condolence letters today than I would care to count. But the name does sound familiar. I’m sorry, son.”

 _Keep calm keep calm keep calm keep_ fucking _calm_. The room is spinning; his lungs constrict like he’s having an asthma attack. He forces himself to keep speaking, to keep his head clear. _He’s not dead, he’s not, he can’t be._ “Are you sure?”

“He didn’t come back. If he’s not dead, he’s as good as. They all are.”

Hope sings through his veins. “Are you planning a rescue mission?”

Phillip snorts. “Yeah! It’s called winning the war.”

“But if you know where they are, why not at least—” Steve sputters, not quite checking the anger starting to smolder in his chest.

“They’re nearly five hundred miles behind the lines, through the most heavily fortified territory in Europe. We’d lose more men than we’d save—but I don’t expect you to understand that, because you’re a chorus girl.”

“I think I understand just fine.” That thing about keeping calm? It’s gone.

“Then understand it _somewhere else_ ,” Phillips orders, starting to stand. He’s clearly through with Steve’s insubordination, even if he’s willing to let it slide in the face of his loss. “If I read the posters correctly, you’ve got some place to be in thirty minutes. Word to the wise, son: don’t get smart with the boys actually fighting this war.” With that, Phillips turns to stare at the big map hung on the tent wall.

Steve stares, too, hands shaking. There’s a small, bright pin marking their position, another up north, not too far from the Austrian border, marking where the soldiers were lost.

Steve storms out, uncaring that people jump out of his path in fright.

“If you have something to say, right now is the perfect time to keep it to yourself,” he hears Phillips say to Peggy.

Emotional upheaval blankets Steve’s perception of time and space. One second, he’s out in the rain, hair starting to clump to his head with wetness. The next he’s in his tent, shoving into a pair of proper army pants, tights and shorts thrown every-which-way. There’s a blue helmet next to him; he must have snagged it from the chorus girls’ tent, even if he can’t remember doing so.

Peggy comes in as he’s stuffing a small bag with necessities; a few bandages, some rations, water. He doesn’t remember getting those either. The bag might be outright stolen, not just borrowed. It’s worn and a bit dirty. None of the soldiers here will miss it for a while longer.

“What do you plan to do? Walk to Azzano?” she asks, eagle-sharp eyes taking in his face, his jerky movements, the slight redness of his eyes and cheeks. It’s rage. Just rage. Bucky’s not dead. He’s _not_.

“If that’s what it takes,” Steve answers stubbornly, jutting out his chin in preparation for an argument. If he has to fight her to get out, he will. He won’t like it, and he won’t come out unscathed, but he’ll do it. Peggy might take an eye, it’d be just her style, and Steve’s not stupid enough to recognize just how unstable his emotions are making him.

“You heard Colonel Phillips. Your friend is most likely dead.”

“You don’t know that.” He doesn’t yell. But he wants to. Push him again and he might.

Peggy cocks her head at him. “You’ll be slow on foot.”

“Not slower than those just sitting here. And I’m not going on foot.” They won’t miss one paltry jeep, will they? Not like there’s a ton of men around to drive it. He pushes past her, putting the tent and the horror behind. There’s only one road, and it’s ahead.

It’s stopped raining; it’s bitingly cold instead.

He’s made it almost all the way to the edge of the camp when he realizes that Peggy is still following him. She raises her brows at the time it takes him to notice her and just looks at him as he keeps walking anyway.

Is she going to follow him all the way to Azzano? “You told me you though I was meant for more than this. Did you mean that?” _Do you trust Steve Rogers’ judgement over that of the American army?_

As if she’s only been waiting for him to ask, Peggy nods decisively. “Every word.”

“Then you gotta let me go.” He heads for a jeep somewhat hidden from view of the camp. He can probably hot-wire it. It didn’t look that hard when Bucky’s mechanic friend did it back home.

He’s brought out of his musings by a slap across the back of his head. Peggy looks thoroughly annoyed with him. “I taught you to fight smart. Now act like it. Follow me, I can get you to Azzano.” She walks away.

Steve hesitates, then sprints after her.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve goes on a rescue mission

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> miiiiiight add another chapter in a couple of days, until then, enjoy. and thank you to everyone who reads, adds kudos, and comments!

Speaking of goddamned fucking things that Steve hasn’t been told about: Howard Stark has been kicking around camp for days. Seriously, a rich inventor gets to the front before Steve has the chance to? There is no justice in this world. However, the man is easily convinced to take Steve north, and that at least makes up for the way he looks Steve up and down with a proprietary gleam in his eyes.  _Don’t start a fight. Bucky needs you._

Stark even has his own plane, a smaller, sleeker version of the cargo plane Steve learned to parachute from on one godawful basecamp day—an experience that made him throw up  _a lot_ , and that he’d sort of been hoping to never, ever repeat. But it’s the only way to get to Bucky, and besides, his new body will probably handle parachuting better. Probably. Hopefully.

He and Peggy are in the hold, rocking with the motions of the plane. It’s dark outside, but lighter than it’d been on the ground thanks to the cover of clouds. They’re not flying that high, but they’d be flying completely blind if they kept solely between the heavy clouds.

“There’s a long-established HYDRA base about a hundred miles east of Azzano,” Peggy is telling Steve. “It’s the most likely place for them to have taken the men. From what our scouts have been able to deduce, it’s a factory of some kind.”

“We should be able to drop you right on the doorstep!” Mr. Stark calls from the cabin.

“Just get me as close as you can,” Steve calls back.

He’s still in the top part of his spangly costume. Even in the dark, the white, red, and blue will be particularly eye-catching, so he’s thrown a worn leather jacket over it. The jacket is a personal indulgence; he’s brought it all the way from the states with him, though not from Brooklyn. With the show-girl helmet on his head and his prop shield on his arm, he looks about as unsuited for the battlefield as a combat-trained, six-foot-two-inches fella in army boots can.

Across from him, Peggy’s hunched over a little, trying to avoid getting bruised all over her back by leaning against the sides of the plane as it shakes through some light turbulence. “You know, you two are gonna be in a lot of trouble,” Steve says to her, both a warning and an unspoken  _thank you_.

Peggy raises a brow. “And you won’t?”

He shrugs. “Where I’m going, if anybody yells at me, I can just shoot ‘em.” It’s almost nonchalant except for the tremble in his voice. He’s never killed a man before. Heinz Kruger killed himself and Steve shook him as he convulsed. He’s never wanted to kill anyone, but they’ve got Bucky. His best friend’s life might hinge on him making the tough choices.

Peggy snorts. It’s a thoroughly inelegant sound and all the more charming for it. “They will undoubtedly shoot back.”

“Let’s hope this is good for somethin’, then,” Steve says, tapping his knuckles against the shield.

It’s a nearly two-hour flight, mostly carried out in silence, except for when Stark calls something or other back to Peggy. They’re more than passingly familiar with one another, it seems. Steve’s not really listening, trying to keep himself calm as they get closer. What if they’re too late? What if the men aren’t held at that factory? What if they’ve retreated to Austria? What if Bucky really is—

“Agent Carter, if we’re not in too much of a hurry I thought we could stop off in Lucerne after, get some late-night fondue?” Stark cheekily interrupts Steve’s thought spiral. His grin is sly and knowing and Steve doesn’t like it one bit.  _What the Hell is fondue?_

Rather than answering him, Peggy gets up and helps Steve get ready, tugging at the various straps of his parachute to ensure they’re clipped on right. Her eyes keep darting to his face, as if she’s a little uncomfortable. “Stark is the best civilian pilot I’ve ever seen,” she confesses quietly, almost an apology. “He’s the only one mad enough to brave this airspace. We’re lucky to have him.”

Steve glances back and forth between the two of them, taking in Stark’s smirk and Peggy’s awkwardness. It echoes something he’s seen with Bucky and one of his girls back in Brooklyn, and—is ‘fondue’ slang _?_ In that case, he’s just as uncomfortable listening to this conversation as Peggy is to have someone else listening in.

But he and Peggy are… if not friends, at least brothers—soldiers?  _soldiers_ —in arms? They know each other beyond casual acquaintances after all the hand-to-hand sessions back at base. And Steve’s a little… well. Peggy’s beautiful, and capable, and vicious, and competent, and he’d thought that maybe they’d had that dogged something in common at least, and it’s the most he’s ever had with a dame, and, well.

It’s not rude to ask, is it? “So, are you two…” he starts in a stutter. The attention is severely uncomfortable. “Do you… fondue?”

The look he gets from Peggy is so flat it could level mountains. Calmly ignoring him and his flushing, she picks a smallish device from her pocket and pushes it into his hands. “This is your transponder. Activate it when you’re ready and the signal will lead us straight to you. It’s one of Stark’s little projects.”

It’s a clunky, ugly thing, with a single big button, not exactly hard to work. It almost looks like a child’s toy. “Are you sure this thing works?”

“It’s been tested more than you, pal,” Stark calls. How the Hell can he heard them over the noise of the engines?

The plane dips sharply, and he curses. A loud bang shatters the white-noise shrillness of the rattling engines. It’s followed by another, and then another, flashes lighting up the airspace around them. Peggy has stumbled backwards, hurriedly buckling herself back in to avoid being thrown around. Stark’s swearing up a storm.

They’ve been spotted. The enemy is in pursuit.

They’re half an hour from the drop-site. Stark avoids the worst blasts, but the enemy is getting closer and more numerous with every swerve. They’ll go down if they don’t get out soon, get out  _right now_.

Steve stumbles towards the door, pulling at the straps of his parachute one last time. He’s as prepared as can be, high above ground and in the middle of an aerial attack.

“Get back here!” Peggy barks at him. He almost turns back, purely basecamp habit. “We’re taking you all the way in!”

“No! As soon as I’m free, you turn this thing around and get the hell outta here!” he yells back, pulling the door open. The night air punches him in the face with a vengeance. Fuck, it’s cold.

“ _You can’t give me orders!_ ”

“The hell I can’t! I’m a Captain!”

One last look at Peggy, then Steve’s falling. She is absolutely going to murder him if he comes back.

*

It takes something like half the night to get to the HYDRA factory, and it’s approaching morning when Steve freezes at the sound of car engines.

The terrain hasn’t been easy to navigate, but given that he’s armed only with a flashlight, a paper map, and a compass, he’s made pretty good time. Especially considering he’s never actually been in a real forest before. Thank God his body had handled parachuting better or he’d have been dead from the moment he hit the ground. Still, he’d kept thinking he’d gotten lost, that he’d been too far west to simply head north, that he’d passed it by and was in Austria or something by now.

He’s sweaty, dirty, and thirsty. The trucks rumbling up behind him are a godsend.

He hides in the underbrush, eyes fixed on the vehicles. They’re great, noisy machines, the wheels so big that the lower parts of the trucks are a good two feet off the ground. They’re driving carefully and not all that fast, cautious of potholes. They look vaguely like military transports and could be carrying anything, supplies, weapons,  _men_. He can’t risk boarding through the back or sides. But with the truck bed so high off the ground…

_Please, God, let this work._

As the first truck slows to a crawl to pass a particularly nasty stretch of road, making the other trucks fall idly in line, he sneaks out from his hiding place, slides under the closest truck. No shouts rise up, so he takes a moment to take stock: there’s not a whole lot of safe-looking places to put his hands and feet, but desperation forces him to cling to the underbelly of the truck as it rumbles back to life and starts moving.

It’s one of the worst experiences of his life, near-death and parachuting included. His muscles strain with every bump in the road, make his limbs shake with effort. The journey seems to take forever, but it’s only something like ten minutes before they finally halt for good.

There are voices all around, drivers disembarking and shouting to the guards. German is such a harsh language to Steve’s ears, and he finds it particularly sharp when articulated at such volumes. Erskine’s soft accent hadn’t been this grating, he’s sure. Maybe it’s the speaker who makes the cadence of a language, not the other way around.

He clings and clings until the area falls silent. No one thinks to check underneath the trucks; who’d be stupid or strong enough to sneak in that way? It’s not Steve’s fault they’re lax. It’s a damn blessing, is what it is.

When he lets go, he drops the ground and pants as quietly as possible, letting the tremors subside. He’s allowed a minute, but just a minute. Then it’s time to go.

*

The first man Steve kills dies with a desperate gurgle.

He’s been in luck so far; the factory is largely quiet and lightly guarded, once again owing to the relative safety of thinking that no one would ever be stupid enough to sneak in—or lucky enough to do so and get far before being discovered and promptly captured.

He slips past a few pairs of guards, ducks behind tanks and around corners, light on his feet like never before. He even scales a massive  _panzerwagen_  as easily as a cat, barely even needing to catch his breath. Is this what having a purpose feels like now that he has the strength to carry it out? None of the heaving and struggling for breath, just moving and doing. It’s liberating.

But these guards, a small squadron, are in the way.

Going on instinct, Steve’s gone down into the bowels of the factory, heart pounding from nerves rather than taxation. On the way, he passes huge working areas filled with half-assembled weaponry of a kind he’s never seen before. He doesn’t stop for a longer look, and ends up blundering right into an occupied hallway, capturing the guards’ attention at once.

He’s damned fortunate that they’re as gob-smacked to see him as he is to see them. It’s a silent stand-off for about two seconds. Then a pair of them run forward and another draws air to call out.

Steve moves.

Later, he’ll remember every detail of the fight, but while he’s in it, he doesn’t think, just moves. The guards are much slower than him, almost hindered by their great, clumsy weapons—fully assembled versions of the ones he’d seen upstairs. They’re clearly unused to them still.

The first one, he punches in the jaw so hard it snaps right out of place; the man stumbles back, dazed and pained and helpless. Disarm, break the other guard’s arm, grapple, punch him in the kidneys; there’s a crack, his spine snapping. Two more follow in quick succession; disarm, outwit, snap, snap,  _crack._ He’s at the side of the one poised to yell within a minute.

The man is clearly terrified, frozen in the act of opening his mouth. The white of his eyes are almost the same color as his pallid skin. He’s shat his pants; Steve can smell it. He grabs the guard by the neck, pushes him against the wall; his grip is too tight, but Steve barely notices.

The noises of the dying man will haunt him later. The wheeze of breath, the pop of muscle and bone, the bubbling of superfluous spit rising in the back of the guard’s throat. The body goes lax, the eyes roll back.

Steve’s not even breathing heavily. It feels like the fight has happened to another person and he’s only just now tuning in from behind his own eyes. He looks around, sees the damage he’s wrought. The guards are all down, broken on the floor. Even the one with the dislocated, broken jaw has passed out from pain alone.

He looks at the door they were guarding, looks back. Most aren’t dead, just unconscious. They are largely useless, but could they raise the alarm if they came to?  _Will_  they come to?

He can’t risk it.

 _Snap, snap, snap, snap._ Four broken necks. He riffles through their pockets, unearths keys, and unlocks the door after a few tries. The room is empty,  _thank God_. Not wanting to raise the alarm should another patrol check the hallway, he drags the bodies inside, piling them like garbage bags in a corner.

The room is small and dark, almost office-like. It smells curiously stale, like sweat and unwashed bodies. Across from the door he’s just come through, there’s another locked door. Unlike the previous one, this one’s a heavy, iron-like structure with a large wheel in the center for a handle. Steve turns it slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible.

The door swings open with a slight whine and a hiss of air.

Hundreds of prisoners stare back at him.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve meets a few of the future Howlies and finds Bucky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i said a few days until update? i lied. i'm heading into exam due-date, so this'll be it for now. unless i need to procrastinate and start writing this instead. i'm hopeless that way.

The obvious thing to do would be to let them out, but Steve’s a little too scatterbrained at the moment as trembles start to work their way through his body. He just killed five people. _Jesus, he_ murdered _five people._  

“ _Hey_!” a voice whisper-shouts over the roar of blood in his ears. Steve snaps upright, a little too sudden judging by the way the prisoners flinch from him. The speaker is a black man in army fatigues; even in the gloom of the prison cells, Steve can tell he’s smudged with oil and sweat and dirt. “Who’re you supposed to be?” He’s American, has got a thick, southern drawl.

“I’m—” Steve starts, looking down at his body then up at the prisoners. “I’m Captain America.”

Quite a few men raise their brows at that, looking at each other in true _getta load a’this guy_ fashion.

“I beg your pardon?” comes a posh British voice, this time from a tall, blond man in the same cell as the soldier. He wears fatigues, too, though not of any kind Steve’s yet encountered.  

Wait.

Lightbulb. They’re _all_ soldiers. These are the missing soldiers. _Bucky could be here._

“Sergeant James Barnes!” Steve calls, jogging down the hall and past the cells. “ _Bucky_! Sergeant James Barnes of the 107th!”

“ _I know ‘im_!”

The shout comes from one of the first cells; Steve sprints back, making the soldiers flinch backwards again. Same cell as the other two speakers, this time a brawny soldier with a grand mustache. Like the first soldier, he stands close by the bars, meeting Steve’s gaze head on.

“Where is he?” Steve demands.

“Why should I tell you?” he shoots back, a shrewd look in his eyes. He’s wearing a bowler hat. Why’s he wearing a bowler hat?

“I’m Steve Rogers,” Steve pleads. Bucky has to have mentioned him, maybe just once, but _at least_ once.

The man’s eyes widen almost comically before narrowing. “Bullshit.”

“I _am_.”

“Barnes’ Stevie is five foot—”

“—Four inches and a hundred pounds soaking wet with a bad heart, bad lungs, and bad temper,” Steve rattles off, so used to this speech. “ _Where’s Bucky?”_

The soldier is just staring at him, gaping.

At that point, Steve loses his temper, just a little bit. Rather than doing the smart thing and, _you know_ , trying the keys _in his hand_ , he grabs the bars of the cell door and _wrenches_ it right off its hinges, then hurtles it down the hall. Several gasps and dropped jaws follow, even a few oaths. 

The latter brings Steve back to himself, makes him hunch in on himself like he’s just angry, little Stevie Rogers, Brooklyn boy and Bucky Barnes’ best friend. He meets the mustached soldier’s eyes, a little bashfull. The soldier—and the other two, as well—are all staring at him like he’s a circus freak, which, well. He’ll give them that, just for now.

With amazing grace, the brawny soldier snaps to attention, though he doesn’t salute. “Sergeant Dugan of the 69th. This here’s Private Jones of the 92nd and Major Falsworth of His Majesty’s Brigade-or-other—”

“Independent Parachute Brigade, you dunce,” the Major interjects.

“—that’s what I said. You mind giving me those keys, friend?”

“What—oh, right, of course!”

Private Jones runs off with the keys to start breaking the rest of the soldiers out. They’re all starting to regain some courage now that Steve’s no longer quite as imposing to look at and thankfully being held up by Sergeant Dugan.

“Barnes isn’t with us anymore,” Dugan says, “he’s— _woah_! Easy, come on, on your feet, Rogers!” But Steve’s knees aren’t working, and the ground is rising up. He vaguely senses Dugan and Falsworth grabbing onto his arms and heaving him back on his feet, straining under his weight. _Oh God, oh God, Bucky, no, no no no –_ “Rogers! Rogers, get up, he might still be here—”

 _Still here?_ Steve plants his feet, spins to grasp Dugan by the shoulder. His grip might be a little too tight, going by the wince on Dugan’s face. “Where is he? What do you mean? What’s happened to him?”

“We don’t know, they came for him a few weeks ago. They’ve taken others before, men that don’t come back. That’s when they choose the next one. They haven’t been back since Barnes.”

Desperate hope is like high-proof liquor, euphorically dizzying and horrendously nauseating at once. “Where did they take him?”

Falsworth clears his throat for attention, jerks his chin upwards. “There’s an isolation ward in the center of the upper levels, you can glimpse it from the factory floor. We’ve never actually seen them take anyone inside, but it’s the only place that sees regular activity—Rogers! Rogers, you got a plan?”

 Steve’s already running. “The tree line is southwest, eighty yards past the gate! Get out fast, give ‘em hell, I’ll meet you guys in the clearing!” he yells back.

“You sure you know what you’re doin’?” Private Jones hollers.

“Yeah! I’ve knocked out Adolf Hitler over two hundred times!” _Sorta_. Faux-knocked out an actor playing Adolf Hitler. Details. He can lift a motorcycle over his head, he’ll be fine.

Faintly, he hears a thoroughly pissed-off voice says: “I’m from _Fresno_ , ace.”

*

The upper levels are a labyrinthine mess of elevated catwalks and small storage areas. Steve heads for the center of the factory, peeking into every room on the way, but they’re all empty. The sounds of combat start drifting in from the outside; shouts and shots, the sudden, sharp bang of grenades. Ten minutes into it, the thunderous roar of a tank joins in the cacophony; either Steve’s delirious or a gleeful _wahoo!_ follows it.

He’s jogging down another long hallway when a small, portly man hurries from a room straight ahead. He’s clutching a briefcase nervously, eyes round when they land on Steve. They regard one another, Steve with surprise, the small man with fear, before he turns and runs off.

Steve starts after him.

He’d have chased the man down. In seventy-five years or so, he’ll wish he had. Instead, he glances into the room the man had hurried from and stops dead.

There’s a body strapped to a chair, dark head of hair just visible above the headrest. A ceiling spot illuminates his form almost dramatically, making him appear saint-like. He’s mumbling, slurring more like, the same thing over and over. “Sergeant… three-two… five-five-seven…”

Steve knows that voice.

He nearly falls over his own feet hurrying into the room, breath stuck in his throat. He stands over the man strapped down in the chair like an animal, stands over _Bucky_. Even half-starved and delirious, he’s beautiful, the most beautiful person Steve’s ever seen. His hair isn’t just dark as in Steve’s memories, it has chestnut undertones. His lips are so pink, almost congruent with his pallid skin.

“Bucky? Bucky! Oh, my God,” he breathes, hands shaking. He’s afraid to touch him; what if he’s hallucinating and Bucky’s not really here? What if touching him will dispel him entirely?

But Bucky opens his eyes and it’s like seeing the sky for the first time. His eyes are like winter, light and gray-blue, cold starlight. “I… s’that…”

“It’s me, it’s Steve. Bucky, wake up.”

“Steve?”

Steve rips at the restraints, tears them clean off. He’s so, so careful helping Bucky out of the chair. He’s thin under Steve’s hands. His collarbones stand out starkly. Have they starved him all this time? The other prisoners, while filthy, hadn’t looked completely malnourished. What has been _done_ to him? Nausea churns.  

“ _Steve_.” There’s a bit more strength in Bucky’s voice now. He pulls at Steve, disbelieving.

“I thought you were dead,” Steve confesses, pawing Bucky right back, running his hands over his arms, his shoulders. Miraculously, he only appears to be thin but not weak. Out of it, but not near fainting.

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky whispers back, still not quite back in his right mind. The rapid blinking, however, is a good sign. It’s also a sign that Steve is going to get yelled at in the near future, but that’s fine, it’s great. Bucky’s _alive_. Steve will take getting reamed out over Bucky being dead any day.

He drags Bucky out of the room, away from that horrid chair. It’s somewhat of a stumble. Bucky can’t quite keep his feet under him, leans half his weight on Steve. His eyes burn holes in the side of Steve’s face. “What happened to you?”

Time to lie. “I joined the army!” He definitely doesn’t sound manic, _no, sir._ That’s just natural cheer. _Really_.

Bucky must be out of it still, because he only nods like that explanation in any way makes sense. “Did it hurt?” Steve half-shrugs with the shoulder not currently supporting Bucky. Bucky pokes at his cheek. “Is it permanent?”

 _If not, we’re shit outta luck._ “So far.”  

Another thunderous explosion. The floor shakes under them. Outside, the noise has calmed a bit, shrieks of dying men, a choir of the damned. The air is dry and hot, heavy with smoke; the factory is burning. _Gotta get out, gotta get Bucky out, gotta make it–_

_“Captain America!”_

Steve and Bucky skid to a stop, look across a shallow catwalk. A tall, stately man in a long, dark coat—almost straight out of the Captain America comics Steve’s seen back in the states; if this guy isn’t an enemy, Steve doesn’t know what he is—and leather gloves. The small, portly man stands a few steps behind him, eyes darting between Steve and Bucky. There’s something almost possessive in the way he looks at Bucky, much like Stark looks at Steve.

“How exciting!” the tall man continues in a heavy but perfectly comprehensible accent. “I’m a great fan of your films.” _What the fuck_? He looks Steve up and down, an air of slight disapproval in his gaze like a parent finding fault with their offspring. “So, Dr. Erskine managed it after all. Not exactly an improvement, but still impressive.”

He’s clearly not seen images of Steve from before Rebirth if he thinks this isn’t an improvement, but at least his words denote his identity: Johann Schmidt, first recipient of the supersoldier serum. As he talks, he slowly strolls across the catwalk, eyes fixed on Steve almost gleefully. He _wants_ a reaction. Well; Steve will fucking give it to him.

Slipping from Bucky’s grasp and hefting his shield into his hands, Steve matches Schmidt step for step, meets him in the middle. He hauls back his fist and cracks Schmidt right across the jaw, just like Peggy taught him.

Astoundingly, Schmidt only stumbles back a little before getting back on his feet, largely unruffled, if a little annoyed by the punch. The skin around his eyes seems weirdly slack.

“You’ve got _no idea_ ,” Steve spits at him.

An unholy gleam alights in Schmidt’s eyes. “Haven’t I?” he growls and hauls back for his own punch. Going on instinct born in back-alley fights, Steve gets the shield up in the last second before impact.

Schmidt’s fist almost punches through it. It’s _metal._ Light metal, but still. The hit sends Steve stumbling backwards from the force of it, almost tripping onto his ass.

The portly man rushes forward and pulls a lever; the catwalk separates in the middle with a shudder, the two halves pulling Steve and Schmidt in opposite directions. Schmidt’s still poking at his face.

 “No matter what lies Erskine told you,” he calls. “I was his greatest success!”

Steve’s grown up being told masturbating would give you hairy palms, but this is the stupidest shit he’s ever heard. As his half of the catwalk folds into its socket, Bucky grabs him by the shoulder and hauls him back; Steve lets him. He glowers at Steve, all _what exactly did you think that would accomplish?_ It makes Steve’s heart soar with familiarity.

And what the Hell is Schmidt doing?

He’s picking at the skin at his neck, like trying to pick a scab. Slowly, disgustingly, he starts to pull. His face just… _gives_. They watch in horror as bright red skin—or is it raw muscle?—appears beneath the human-mask. Bucky clutches Steve’s wrist, gagging. The face that appears is skull-like, mad eyes deep-set, cheekbones exposed, mouth lipless.

“You don’t have one of those, do you?” Bucky mumbles out the corner of his mouth. The human-mask drops into the inferno on the factory floor below them.

“You are deluded, Captain,” Schmidt goes on like that little show is something he does every day. “You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality, you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind.” Today is the first time Steve’s ever pretended to be anything like a soldier. He’s been way for circus-freak for months than he’s been anything approaching human. He’s not going to tell Schmidt that, though. “Unlike you, I embrace it proudly. Without fear!”

He turns away.

Steve, because he’s never found a fight he hasn’t tried to join, yells: “ _Then how come you’re running?_ ”

Sadly—or luckily, depending on your point of view—Schmidt doesn’t rise to the bait, instead hurrying from the collapsing factory with the portly man on his heels.

Bucky pulls at him. Steve follows.

There’s only one shallow structure left connecting their side of the factory to the way out. It isn’t a real catwalk, just a few beams left from a half-collapsed gantry and a couple of long, slender pipes, not exactly structurally sound what with the all the burning and collapsing going on around them.

Still, it’s the only way.

He pushes Bucky ahead of him, forcing himself to be unafraid. They’ll make it; they have to. He’s just found Bucky again. This isn’t how it ends. Bucky makes his way across slowly, arms stretched out for balance. Steve’s hands haven’t yet lowered when the gantry shudders and dips, almost sending Bucky into the sea of fire below. A half-strangled shout makes its way out from Steve’s throat.

But Bucky is fast and finally fully awake. He regains his balance and takes a few running steps, throwing himself forward just as the structure collapses entirely. He collides with the railing, _hard_ , and pulls himself up and over. He’s across.

Those beautiful starlight eyes find Steve’s own. Even with the new experience of color, they’re so, so familiar to Steve; they’re home, they’re Brooklyn and long winters and hot summers and unspoken, decades-long devotion.

“There’s gotta be a rope or something!” Bucky’s voice’s gone all hoarse from the smoke. He needs to get out quickly, his body won’t be able to withstand the air in here much longer.

“Just go! I’ll find another—”

“ _No!_ Not without you!” Bucky roars.

Steve looks helplessly around. There’s nothing here to help him, no convenient beam or length of rope to throw. On the other side, Bucky’s leaning forward like he’s going to try and get back to Steve.

That, more than anything, makes Steve grab hold of the already broken railing on his side. He pulls, forcing the metal towards himself, then skips around it and pushes it all the way back. It clears a path; there’s only air between him and Bucky now. He steps back, one step, two, three. Makes a run for it.

Jumps—

The fire roars up from below, nipping at his heels. He closes his eyes; the last thing he sees is Bucky’s face.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which they have made it out and make plans for their journey south

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bonjour, here's a shortish chapter written in the midst of surviving exams.

It’ll end up taking them four days to reach base—nearly half of what it would have taken Steve to reach Azzano in the first place. The march is only that short because the frontlines have been redrawn and moved quite a few miles north since Steve made his way here, the base relocating as well. But as Steve and Bucky stumble from the smoking, still-burning heap that was once a HYDRA factory, there’s no such thing as logistics on Steve’s mind. There’s not much of anything sensible, really, only _Jesus Christ, that fucking worked?_ and _he’s alive, we’re alive, we’re together._ He keeps looking at Bucky, making certain he’s still there, that he’s still _real_. He can’t believe it. They made it.   

Bucky looks back at him, too, just as disbelieving. That won’t last, Steve knows. Already, the ominous signs of held-back fear and frustration are working their way onto Bucky’s face, tightening his lips and putting the righteous fire of God and all his angels in his eyes. It’s cold, so cold, but the fire at their backs and the sweat and adrenaline from the fight keep them warm.

The soldiers who made it out have set up camp slightly south of where Steve pointed them to, likely to put some extra distance between themselves and their former prison. Having walked in almost complete silence, it’s like falling into a whole new world as the sounds of camp envelop them with all the gentleness of a crashing wave. Shouts go up the second they’re spotted. Men come running to get them settled, to stare and report and spill a hundred things from their mouths that Steve can barely follow, there’re so many voices.

“Hey! Hey, _hey_! Back off! Let me through! They need medical attention! _Move_!” comes a slightly familiar, snappish voice.

An Asian man makes his way through the crowd, throwing sharp elbows left and right to get to Steve and Bucky. He’s not tall, but not exactly short either, and has straight-as-a-pin black hair and a lot of scruff on his face. The kind of dark circles that you only get from countless sleepless night make his otherwise bright eyes appear slightly sunken, and a scowl fit to scold an entire parish into repenting twists his mouth. A number of the men look ready to fight him, more than one of them sneering, but the second Sergeant Dugan comes up behind him, they all scatter.

The man stops in front of Steve and Bucky, brows raised expectantly. A field-medic’s bag swings from his shoulder, looking somewhat depleted.

“Anything bleeding?” he demands. “Anything broken? Anything feel like it’s ruptured?” They shake their heads.

“Apologies for Morita, he was raised in a barn,” Dugan chips in from where he’s keeping an eye on the men still lingering close.

“Fuck you, Dum Dum,” Morita spits, rolling his eyes. He fixes them with a steady, stubborn gaze. “Are you lying to me about your injuries?” Bucky smiles like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and Steve widens his eyes in the _would this face lie to you?_ manner that worked so well when he was smaller. Morita’s upper lip curls in disgust; other soldiers have definitely tried to pull this shit, too.

In the end, he manages to bully Bucky into a proper exam by sheer force of will and a lot of heavy glowering, dragging him off to a hastily erected tent that serves as the camp’s shabby medical suite. He looks sorely tempted to grab Steve as well, only letting him go because Steve keeps insisting that the serum will take care of anything that he can’t actively pinpoint—and he can feel a lot of small hurts making themselves known, but he’s not about to tell anyone that.

Seeing the back of Bucky’s head as he marches off sends an almost primal surge of anxiety through Steve’s gut. It’s irrational, he knows it is. Bucky’s not going to disappear, nor is he going to die on him now that he’s finally free of whatever hell that lab had been. God, the _lab_. What’ve they done to him? Steve didn’t even ask, what if they cut him open, what if they—

“Captain, if you’ll follow me, please.”

It takes a second to realize Dugan is addressing _him_. He’s not a real captain, doesn’t expect any of the men to call him by that rank. No one in the USO troupe ever called him that either, so the title settles around him uneasily. Slightly out of his depth and more than a little bewildered, he’s led to a quieter area at the edge of camp.

There are things to take care off, plans to make, losses to count. There’s no time to dawdle or worry about inadequacy. Steve must simply act. _At least Brandt prepared me for something._

They’ve already started burying the men who didn’t make it, eighteen in total—not counting the ones they had to leave behind in the cells, those they lost on the factory floor, the ones taken from the cells and never returned. They’ve got thirteen heavily wounded, twenty-four wounded-but-walking, everybody else scraped up but largely alright. Someone was smart enough to steal a few wagons loaded with provisions, so they’ve got some food and water, but not much, it’s going to be some tight rationing. They’re almost out of medicine and bandages. Dugan stole a tank—he says it’s different from the American tanks, has quite a bit more power behind its engine.

There are only a few commanding officers left—‘a few’ being Steve (good God) and Major Falsworth (“call me Monty, for pity’s sake”) who is in no hurry to assume command over the American troops. He’s one of only four Brits in the sea of soldiers, all of whom are a mix of different regiments and squads. The 107th make up the majority, some fifty men or so; all together, they’re one hundred and seventeen currently living. So many others are gone.

Steve is both humbled and shaken by the instant loyalty and deference shown to him, particularly by Dugan, Jones, and, strangely, an odd, little Frenchman (the _only_ Frenchman; where the hell did he come from?) with steady hands whom Steve only meets briefly. Steve speaks maybe two words of French, one of which is “bonjour” and the other “merci”, both heavily accented, but Jacques Dernier seems to understand him anyhow, looking to Jones to translate only when something escapes him.

Within the hour, Steve has something resembling chain of command and a plan. He and Monty agree to share the burden of command, but even he is content to defer to Steve over-all. There’s something slow and sly about him, not negatively so, it’s just an odd quality to possess in the middle of a warzone. It’s a relief that he’s not fighting Steve’s temporary officer status, it’d be a damn shitshow if he was given power only to have it questioned at every turn. Not that he’d have disagreed with Monty; he’s barely out of basecamp, after all, not a commanding officer or even a sergeant, just a dumbass private who’s been dancing around a stage for months.  

Once he’s been bullied into taking a break by Dugan and Monty, Bucky finally comes and finds him. Jones, who has been keeping Steve company (or rather, making sure he doesn’t try to get up), takes one look at Bucky’s stormy expression and whistles low under his breath.

“Captain Rogers is resting,” he says, not putting any particular effort into making it sound like he believes Steve’s doing so. “Major’s orders.”

To Steve’s surprise, Jones gets to his feet and grabs Bucky’s forearm, a gesture heartily returned. The two grin fiercely at one another, slightly manic in their joy. Jones jerks his head at Steve, tells Bucky to look after him, and quickly walks away, whistling pleasantly as he goes. He _definitely_ knows Bucky beyond simple camaraderie, being able to read him like that.

It’s not a second too soon.

Bucky rounds on Steve, steam practically coming out his ears. “What the god damn hell did you do to yourself?”

“Joined the army, I already told you this, Buck,” Steve tries innocently.

“Don’t pull that shit with me, Rogers, I heard you spewing all that crap about serum-this, serum-that. That shit better have been tested—it was tested, right, you didn’t just hop onto a cot and let them— _Jesus Christ_ , Steve, tell me you fucking demanded in-depth information before signing on for that horseshit.”

 _Does a warning from the first successfully-serumed supersoldier count as in-depth information_? And Erskine _had_ told him some stuff. Well, after he’d signed up, but it counts, right? “Sure did, Buck.”

Bucky squints at him. Winter-pale eyes go wide with indignance. “Mother of _God_ , Steve! You stupid punk, what did I tell you, huh? What did I say, I said ‘don’t do anything stupid’ and you run right off to do experimental procedures, _Christ_ —”

“Buck, Bucky, come on, calm down—”

“Do not tell me to calm down, do you have any idea what it’d do to m—to my family if you died, do you think Ma’d just go on with her day, or Becca’d never think of you again, or—”

“ _Bucky_!” Steve yells, starling Bucky enough to shut up. Steve rarely yells in private, almost never raises his voice at Bucky or any of their family. Yelling’s for bullies, for fighting. He’ll snap, whisper-shout, but not yell. “I’m fine! Sit down, come on, I swear I’m alright, nothing bad happened—”

“Steve, you are the size of goddamn horse!” Bucky waves his hands around like he’s having a fit.

“I’m also healthy as a horse now, come one, is it so bad?” Steve looks away, hands clenching in his lap. “I’m still me, Buck.”

That argument deflates Bucky, taking the wind right out of his sails. He sinks into the dirt next to Steve, knees thudding when they hit the ground. His hair is grimy with fear-sweat and soot and Steve aches to bury his face in it, to breathe in the tangible proof that Bucky survived it all.

He doesn’t, of course. Instead, he cautiously leans his shoulder against Bucky’s, heart clenching when Bucky jumps at the unexpected touch. Bucky sighs, shakes his head, then pulls Steve in for a rib-crunching hug. “You’re such a punk,” he murmurs into Steve’s neck. He smells unwashed; it’s quite horrible. Steve doesn’t flinch.

“You’re a jerk.”

They release each other quickly, intensely aware that their privacy is only an illusion. Any longer, and there’d be some ugly sobbing, at least on Steve’s part. Already it’s scratching at his throat, furious to escape. Steve’s an ugly crier, it’d be quite horrifying for everybody.

“What’d they do to you?” he asks instead, eyes skittering over Bucky’s starved form.

Bucky can’t meet his eyes. “Nothing that broke me.”

“Buck—”

“Steve, stop.” A breath, heavy with banked emotion. “Jim—Morita—couldn’t find anything serious, no wounds, no bruises, no nothing. I don’t remember what happened in that—that—I don’t remember.” He stutters out a few more syllables, none fully realized, like a machine malfunctioning before coming to a sudden, sharp stop. His eyes go eerily blank, staring into nothing. A hundred untold horrors rest in that gaze, a thousand words unspoken, unwanted. Steve’s heart plummets to the lower regions of his stomach, nauseated and afraid. How he’d wondered how Bucky would’ve changed when he saw him again. Here’s his answer; if only he’d never asked.

He can’t rouse him, no matter how much he tries. He can only sit by Bucky’s side and wait for him to come back to himself. Above the trees, black smoke rises. They’ll need to move soon, and quickly. It’s still enemy territory, no matter how burned down.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which they return to camp

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember when i said i was still in exam hell? well i'm procrastinating and here's another chapter

The thing that later historians don’t consider when writing their books and theses is that the whole operation only worked because everyone was desperate enough to put their trust in Steve. At this point, he doesn’t have any field experience, has barely had any strategic training beyond reading old biographies about long-dead warlords and ancient campaigns, and has never been in charge of anyone but himself—and even then, Bucky has always had a hand in keeping Steve in line and vice versa. In seventy years’ time, when Steve picks up a biography about himself (and what a mindfuck that’ll be), he’ll read paragraph after paragraph about his supposed genius and leadership in those early days and laugh so hard the other library patrons will side-eye him for weeks after.

In reality, it takes him more than a day to remember something as simple as the damn transponder in his pocket. Perhaps luckily, the doodad is broken and wouldn’t have made a difference even if he _had_ remembered it earlier.

They lose a couple of men on the way; they bury them quickly and mark the graves. Maybe someday their families will get them back. Dugan, apparently a devout Catholic out of Boston and much more observant than Steve and Bucky have ever been, leads a small service, sounding out familiar Latin phrases and substituting a few words of English here and there to include everyone in remembering the fallen.

In fact, Dugan is one of the greatest gifts to Steve’s first days of leadership. He’s got a booming voice that strikes the fear of God in even the most recalcitrant men, a sunny disposition, and a good head on his shoulders. Between him and Bucky, no one dares step a single toe out of line. Monty, likewise, has all the experience that Steve thoroughly lacks as an officer, and he’s the one to pull Steve aside and guide him through the proper considerations for even small things such as guard shifts, how long they should march each day, who’s in charge of foraging, all those things that should be second nature but aren’t.

They aren’t the only men to stand out. Gabe Jones has an affable nature and a work ethic that puts everybody else to shame, often the first to volunteer for guard duty, dinner duty, med-shifts, anything really, and the last to lay his head down at night. Jim Morita runs the medical tent with an iron fist and it’s only much, much later that Steve will learn that he’s not actually trained for the job and has only developed the skill and experience by necessity after being called on by his old field medic time and time again. Dernier, a resistance fighter, not a trained soldier, knows his way around anything mechanical (and anything that goes boom, for that matter) and makes sure that the trucks are always ready and won’t stall in the middle of the Italian forest in the dead of winter. Nobody says it, but they’re all intensely aware that they’re in the middle of enemy territory.

They’re lucky that most of the countryside seems to be largely either untouched or abandoned after the Allied invasion in the south, leaving Steve and his fellow men to make a slow and cautious trek back to base. It’s a relief that they don’t have to fight their way there; more than a few of the non-wounded men look like they’d lose a fight to a stiff breeze if said breeze got just a little insistent.

Surprisingly, Bucky isn’t included in that number, despite his time in the lab. While at first he’s too thin, weak with pain and stress, and half-delusional from simply talking about what happened to him, a day later you can barely tell he’s the same man who woke up strapped to a table. Instead, he’s gaining strength by the hour, just as capable as he’s always been back home, marching side by side with Steve, pale eyes attentive and alert to their surroundings. He’s still in that green, soft-looking shirt he’d worn when Steve found him, a too-thin, almost too-daring garment that’s unbuttoned to reveal the top of his chest. When he leans forward, his dog tags flash in the sunlight. Steve hasn’t been enchanted by it. Much. It’s a miracle he doesn’t freeze.

If he’s not with Steve, he can be found next to Dernier, looking over the Frenchman’s shoulder as Dernier checks the engines and explains what he’s doing in a mix of French and rare, odd English word—despite his ability to _understand_ English, he doesn’t speak it very well, but they make do.

Most importantly, Bucky hasn’t had any odd spells since that first day. He’d come out of it fine, slightly confused as to where he was and shocked by the time he’d been ‘gone’, but he’d gotten up and shaken it off. Steve’s let it be, has taken care not to mention it or the time spent worrying that Bucky wouldn’t come back from wherever he’d gone in his head.

If Steve were any judge, he’d almost say that Bucky seems… better than the rest of the men. As if the hunger and imprisonment and forced labor hasn’t touched him at all. He’s still thin and hungry, of course, he is, but. He never seems to tire, never shows signs of old aches. If it weren’t for all their years together, Steve wouldn’t notice anything wrong: but Bucky’s stopped laughing.

They don’t talk about it. Nothing’s changed there.

They don’t talk, but Steve worries. He watches Bucky for signs of relapse, is quick to be at his side whenever he’s quiet for just a second too long. At first, it makes Bucky squint at him before lighting up, makes him tell Steve to _stop being such an old woman, I’m fine._ The tenth time he appears at Bucky’s elbow, he’s sent off with a bit more cursing. _I ain’t dying, pal, don’t you got other men to stare down?_ So Steve tries to keep it hidden, tries not to seem like he’s watching Bucky like a hawk. When they curl up at night, side by side, he doesn’t reach out, doesn’t speak, doesn’t watch. He just _listens_ , counts the slightly whistling breaths and steady beats of Bucky’s heart in the dark. It’s enough. It is. It has to be.

All that worrying makes Steve forget himself and his own breakdown ends up being a complete surprise.

It happens in the early hours on the fourth day. They’re about twenty miles from base, though they don’t know that just yet. Steve’s up early, always aware of the expectations and responsibility on his shoulders, even if he’s finally settled into it and is able to fake knowing what the hell he’s doing. He volunteers to gather wood for a fire, eager for a breather. Gabe heads out with him.

There’s frost on the ground, crackling under their boots. The air has a clean, earthy smell that Steve would’ve never been able to dream up if he hadn’t come here. All his childhood and youth, he just thought it would smell green—and it does. But it also smells wet, musky, fresh, cold, sharp. His lungs have never felt clearer than when he breathes in the forest air.

It’s an accident, is the thing. He’s too busy keeping an eye out for scouts, too focused on gathering as many fallen branches as possible. He doesn’t notice Gabe coming up beside him, his brain having already categorized the other as ‘friendly’ and thus not wary of his presence. It’s just another of those odd times where his body and mind work beyond what he’s expecting them to. And maybe it’s a combination of the unexpectedness of touch, maybe it’s the relative safety of a relatively unsafe situation, but when Gabe brushes by his elbow, Steve reacts like a spooked horse, roughly pushing Gabe away.

Stumbling with surprise, Gabe steps heavily on a branch. The crack of it splits the silence like bones breaking. Steve’s back in that hallway in the factory; that man’s spine breaking. Snap, snap, _crack._ His breath wheezes out of him, he’s choking, like that last guard.

When he comes to, he’s half curled up between the roots of a tall tree. The back of his head is stinging; there’s bark in his hair, some dug into his skin. His hands are shaking. His mouth is filthy. Did he throw up? Is it just dryness? He’s sweating but so, so cold.

He filters back into his body step by step, lured in by Gabe’s steady voice. Gabe’s sitting close by, but not too close, seemingly calm—but his shoulders are tense. He’s talking like there’s nothing wrong, not looking at Steve, not turned towards him, just letting him be while being there at the same time.

“… I switched to French in my second semester, there was this girl, you know, absolutely beautiful, biggest brown eyes you’ve ever seen, she was from down in Louisiana and had this habit of pretending not to speak English when guys she didn’t like tried to flirt with her. I dropped German the day I met her, started taking French classes—I only found out she was speaking _Cajun_ French when I tried talking to her and I kept thinking I’d gotten my words wrong and she was taking pity on me and correcting me, and, man, I got so panicked I actually _did_ forget every word I’d ever learned, but then she laughed, God, it was the most gorgeous sound I’d ever heard and—Rogers? Steve, you with me?”

Steve swallows. Tastes bile. _It’s fine, it’s fine, nothing’s wrong, nothing to see here._ “Where’d you go to class?” _Don’t ask me, don’t ask, please, God, let me have this._

“Howard University, up in Washington. They got a pretty good admittance rate for folks like me,” Gabe said, scuffing his booth against the cold ground. He tilts his head slightly towards Steve, looking at him out of the corner of his eye without making direct eye contact. Opens his mouth—

“Don’t tell Bucky,” Steve begs before he can say anything. “I’m sorry. Please. I’m fine; I’m sorry.”

Bucky ends up not needing to be told. He notices the moment Steve walks back into camp, too pale and antsy, unable to hold Bucky’s gaze. He doesn’t ask, though. Can’t without opening the whole can of worms that is his own hell. Instead, they pretend they’re both fine, work side by side, get the men up, get everyone walking.

There’s a single, shared look, a look of understanding and mulish stubbornness, and that’s it.

*

Walking into camp is like something out of a dream.

One of their scouts spots army activity ahead, sneaks closer to confirm it’s an American set-up. His report sends a breath of strength through the men, gives them enough fire to form up into something resembling a proper formation despite the trucks and tanks and wounded messing it up a little.

Steve walks in the front, Bucky close on his right but a few steps behind. Morita, Dernier, Monty and Dugan follow on his heels. They’re coming up the road—a wide dirt path, really—when they’re spotted.

Steve’s heart beats double time as more and more men rush out to watch them. The wounded are received by nurses and other medical staffs, the soldiers of the camp helping out where they can. Soon, Steve is surround by grinning and cheering men. It’s like being seen for the first time, uncomfortable and exhilarating all at once. Still, it makes his mouth pull up in a slightly smug smile; he fucking _did_ it and none of them had believed he could.

When the crowd parts and Colonel Phillips’ unimpressed glare appears, Steve is quick to quench that smile. He’s got an excuse waiting on his tongue, has practiced it as they marched: _well, sir, see, I’m not technically employed by the army as of this exact period of time, really, it’s Senator Brandt’s payroll, so I can’t really have gone AWOL._

He salutes, taking care to pack as much respect into the gesture as possible. He needs all the goodwill he can get to pull this off. “I’d like to surrender myself for disciplinary action, sir—”

“That won’t be necessary,” Phillips interrupts. His gaze bounces from soldier to soldier and a reluctant sort of respect creeps in around his eyes. Reaming Steve out in front of the men he’s brought back, in front of the soldiers who’re busy celebrating their return—that’d be a severe mistake at this point. Instead, Phillips turns on his heel, stalks away; he passes Peggy at the edge of the gathering, mutters to her under his breath.

Ignoring him as politely as possible, Peggy makes her way to the front of the crowd, not even needing to elbow anyone to get there. It’s quite a feat; Steve and his vanguard are hemmed in tightly on all sides by men wanting to shake their hands, to meet the miracle man who brought their fellow soldiers back from certain death.

She stops in front of Steve, leaning back on her heels. A smug smile sits at the corner of her lips, and, if he’s not mistaken, quite a bit of relief. “You’re late,” she informs him in that prim and proper way she has. It makes him want to grin.

He holds up the broken transponder. “Couldn’t call my ride,” he says with a shrug.

They stand there, trying not to laugh like fools. Peggy’s sharp, brown eyes have softened with joy. She’s never looked more approachable, and suddenly she’s not quite so untouchable as she’s always seemed to Steve.

“ _Hey!_ ” Bucky calls behind him. He’s looking around at the men, teeth bared in a viciously satisfied grimace. “Let’s hear it for Captain America!”

His words send the men to nearly screaming, hoots and cheers rising like a tidal wave. Steve holds Bucky’s gaze and makes a _was that really necessary?_ grimace to which Bucky just raises his brows in a _you deserve this, shut up, punk_ manner.

The second he looks away, Bucky’s face falls and a sliver of emptiness comes back into his eyes. Steve doesn’t see it. He’s not meant to.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which the Howling Commandos assemble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my exam is tomorrow, may the gods be good.

The most frustrating and yet best part of Steve having run off on his own is that he now has the US Army and their allies in a bit of a tight spot, politically speaking. The story of the Azzano rescue has already spread like wildfire by the time they reach London, so any hope of putting Steve back in a lab is long gone. They can’t exactly assign him as a private or even private first class, because it’s not just soldiers who have heard of him; it’s them, _and_ the military staff surrounding them, _and_ the soldiers’ families (a lot of letters had to be sent out saying _sorry, your son is alive, this was all a misunderstanding, many apologies_ ), _and_ Senator Brandt has absolute heard about it, as well.  

And so, the journey back to London consists of Steve existing in in a grey zone of relative freedom, belonging to the army and yet not quite. There’s talk of giving him a medal—or it _has_ been given and Steve just wasn’t present for it—and the whole Captain America shtick back in the states has gone absolutely wild with renewed fervor.

Mostly, Steve tries to enjoy his time off by getting to know the guys he already thinks of as _his_ men and watching over Bucky as he finally settles down to recover properly. It mostly involves a lot of cardplaying and sleeping, and it becomes repetitive in just two days. Being stuck on a boat is no one’s idea of fun.

It speeds things up when Steve happens to take one look at one of the giant maps at the SSR headquarters in London and comments that they’re missing a few pins marking HYDRA strongholds. The fact that he’d had that information is a surprise to him, too; he’d merely glimpsed a map in one of the offices he and Bucky had had to sprint through while running from the flames back in Italy, noted down the spots and only realizing what they meant when another map was in front of his face. As a result, he spends a few hours putting down new pins and taking guesses at their importance based on the pin colors back at the factory.

“There was one here in Poland, right near the Baltic,” he remarks, “and another one was… about here, thirty or forty miles west of the Maginot line. These,” he points to a few of the recently planted pins, “are the weapons factories that the other soldiers heard about while captive. But Sergeant Barnes said that HYDRA shipped all the parts they produced to another facility, one that isn’t on this map.”

“Did you get a look at anything like that back there?” Phillips asks.

“No, sir. It was just a quick look, we didn’t really stop to ponder it. Sorry, sir.”

“Well, nobody’s perfect,” Peggy remarks from where she’s bent over the map, throwing a quick smile Steve’s way.

“Agent Carter, coordinate with MI6. I want as many Allied eyeballs looking for that main HYDRA base as they can possibly spare,” Phillips orders. He turns to face Steve fully, sighs heavily. “Because of that foolish stunt back there, the powers-that-be have elected to re-assign you, Rogers. Congratulations, Captain.”

He throws a pin to Steve, a silver double-bar. His throat grows dry, choked with emotion; he’s never dreamed of more than a sergeant’s rank, _at absolute best,_ and that’s if the army ever found use for him _after_ Project Rebirth. Before, merely becoming a private would’ve been nearly untouchable. He’ll need Bucky’s help to pin the bars on properly. “Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. The only reason it’s that high is because Bradley made First Lieutenant and they’ve gotta market you so that no one else notices the Cathcart mess. And truth is, we need you. Hell, we need Bradley, but at least he’s being put to good use in the Pacific. Those high-power HYDRA guns you saw will plow through ordinary men, hell take ‘em. So what say you, Captain Rogers? You ready to join up or was theater more to your liking?”

“I’m ready, sir,” Steve hurries to assure him. He hesitates, forges on. “I’ll need a team.”

“It’s already being put together.”

“With all due respect, sir, I’ve already got the perfect men in mind.”

Phillips squints at him.

In the hour that follows, Steve has to argue for each and every man he’s chosen. Falsworth is, first of all, British, and second of all, _outranks him, are you stupid, Rogers?_ Dernier is not even in the damn military, _we can’t assign him_. Jones and Morita are colored folks and there’s going to be a lot of attention around them, _are you sure that’s the stand you wanna take, Rogers?_ All of America will be watching, one screw up and hell’s going to come pouring down on all their heads, but _especially_ on Jones and Morita for the crime of not being white and thus lesser in certain—bigoted, ignorant—eyes. Some serious strings are going to need to be pulled to get Dugan transferred from the 69th, and _what the hell do you need a second sergeant for, you’re barely big enough to count for a full squad._ But Bucky will be on Steve’s team or he’ll likely head for home, and the Allies would be sad to see a sniper of his caliber go, so in the end, Steve gets his way.

Now he just has to convince the men.

*

Barely a week in London, and Steve’s friends have already made one specific pub their base. It’s one of the older ones in Southwark, a ramshackle, merry place called Ye Olde Mayflower. Steve makes his way there from headquarters, marveling at the resilience of the city and its people even in wartime. There have been no warning claxons as of this evening, so warm light streams from frosted-over windows all around him. People hurry to-and-fro in the slush, going about their day as if there isn’t a war going on and bombs could drop at any moment.

The pub is full when he arrives, and noisier than a classroom filled with misbehaving ten-year-olds. Dugan, Dernier, Morita, Jones, and Monty are seated at a table by the wall, all of them turned in such a way as to keep an eye on the door. When Steve walks in, he’s nearly bowled over by their welcome, _hello_ s giving way to hooting as he shakes his head at them. Yowling cats are less boisterous than these fools.

He looks for Bucky, spots him by the bar; he’s trying to talk the bartender into opening a bottle of whiskey, Morita says, has been at it for a while. Steve will ask him last; he’s the most important, if he says no, Steve’s not sure he’ll have the guts to ask the others, at least not tonight.

“So, let’s get this straight,” Dugan says when Steve’s proposal has been laid out.

“We barely got out of there alive, and you want us to go back?” Jones asks.

Steve shrugs, nods a little cheekily. “Pretty much.”

“Sounds rather… fun, actually,” Monty comments with a sharp smile and a dramatic air. “And at least this means _I_ won’t be the one getting reamed out for tactical stupidity.” He’ll have to follow Steve’s lead, if for no other reason than politics. Rank-wise, he’s still a bit higher up than Steve, but everybody’s willing to ignore that for the sake of a supersoldier leading them.

Morita belches loudly, slams down his empty beer glass. “I’m in.”

Dernier waves his hands excitedly as he talks, a river of unintelligible French that only Jones can follow—they’ve all picked up a few French phrases here and there, still uttered in various degrees of horrible American accents, but it’s something at least. Jones and Dernier shake hands, look back at Steve. “We’re in,” Jones clarifies.

Dugan scratches his impressive moustache, head tilted contemplatively. Like Monty, he’s got a lot to fall back on, comfortably on track to becoming an officer if he wants to. “Hell,” he admits, grinning. “I’ll always fight. You ain’t the strangest thing I’ve followed yet, Rogers, and you ain’t a bad fella, so I guess you’ll do.” He leans in as if planning to conspire to the fall of the Axis powers around an uneven, scruffy bar table. “But you gotta do just one thing for me.”

Steve, having observed how a lot of the soldiers looked at the chorus girls when they first got back to camp, prepares himself to having to turn down Dugan’s request for Mae’s name—for some reason, that girl has all the soldier boys snared, and she’s the most unavailable one of them all, except for Lizzy. He hasn’t seen Dugan look at any of them—in fact, the large man had seemed to actively avoid the girls, eyes always respectfully lowered when forced to talk to them—but it doesn’t mean someone hasn’t caught his eye.

“What’s that?” he asks gamely.

Another grin. “Open a tab, Captain.” 

Steve rolls his eyes as the others howl with laughter, but goes to order another round, nonetheless. Behind him, the men start singing some bawdy drinking song. He slips in next to Bucky, signals the distressed looking barkeep who scurries off with a desperate glance at Steve’s squad as if wondering where they keep putting all that alcohol.

“Heya, Stevie, think you can convince him to break out the liquor, too?” Bucky greets, that old, familiar smile firmly in place. It hits Steve like a punch to the gut. In the warm light of the pub, Bucky seems to glow with life, as if there’s gold running beneath his skin. All those years of grey, and now Steve is finally witness to the splendor that is Bucky Barnes, overlaid in shades of pink, green, brown, and bluish gray. No wonder all the girls had wanted to dance with him.

“I can try,” he promises. Hell, he’ll try to sneak a bottle back to base, if that’ll keep Bucky smiling at him like that. “Look, Buck—”

“You want me to go back,” Bucky says. His eyes are sharp. “I heard you. Those idiots all say yes, huh?”

Steve huffs a breath, looks down. “Yeah. Musta done something right out there. Or maybe they were just blinded by all those tall tales you been telling ‘em. Can’t believe you been calling me Stevie to their faces.” They laugh together, a brief, sharp gust of air. “How about you? You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?”

Bucky scoffs. “Hell no. You heard him talking? He sounds like one of them know-it-alls from Connecticut. But that little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight…” he looks up at Steve through his lashes. It’s suddenly really warm in the pub. “I’m following him.”

After swearing up and down that Steve will stop modulating his accent—Brandt’s aide had tried to make him sound less New York and more all-American while on tour—they finally convince the barkeep to break out the whiskey. It’s not the most expensive kind, but it’ll get the job done, or at least it tastes like it will.

When he has run off to serve other customers, Bucky leans in again. “But you’re keeping the outfit, right?” he breathes right next to Steve’s face.

Forcing himself not to blush, Steve glances over his shoulder to a large poster of himself in the spangly Captain America get-up, nylons, shorts, cowl, and all. It looks particularly hilarious in the middle of a bar filled with off-duty soldiers, some of whom, like Steve and Bucky, are in their dress greens. Even if Bucky’s _are_ a little messy, like he’s flaunting the rules just to spite them.

“You know what? It’s kind of growing on me,” Steve teases back.

Bucky’s face twitches, eyes dropping before hurriedly looking away. His skin is a little rosy, maybe from the heat, but he licks his lips, too, like he’s getting a little—

The singing has stopped.

Steve and Bucky raise their heads, lean back at the same time.

Standing in the doorway is Peggy. Her hair’s loose, waving down to her shoulders. Her lips are redder than they’ve ever been and her eyes sparkle with mirth and poise. To the tune of forty men’s jaws hitting the floor, she confidently walks up to the bar, body wrapped in a form-fitting, red dress. “Captain,” she greets, holding Steve’s eye as if there’s nothing and no one else around for miles.

Steve and Bucky have both stumbled to their feet, shoulders back, hands folded. “Agent Carter,” Steve says, managing not to stutter. _This is no different from all those times you’ve trained with her, get a grip, God, but she’s never looked at you like_ that _—_

“Ma’am,” Bucky mumbles at his side, jerking Steve out of the oncoming tail-spin. Peggy doesn’t even look at him.

“Howard has been put in charge of your equipment, he requests that your squad and yourself make your way to headquarters. Tomorrow morning?”

 _Get a grip, get a grip, get a grip_. “Sounds good.”

Peggy glances over at the squad, who all duck their heads like recalcitrant children caught nosing around. Dugan’s seated by a beat-up piano, hands still frozen over the keys. The others are gathered around the empty beer bottles, having been singing while they waited for their next round. “I see your top squad is prepping for duty.” She softens the comment with a smile.

Steve just stand there speechlessly, smiling like a goof.

“You don’t like music?” Bucky asks, kicking at Steve’s foot as unobtrusively as he can. _Yes, thank you, Buck, I hadn’t noticed what a monumental mess I’m making! Fuck._

“I do, actually,” Peggy says, still looking at Steve. _Oh, God_. “I might even, when this is all over, go dancing.”

Another kick. Bucky’s trying as hard as he can to keep the conversation afloat. “What are you waiting for?”

“The right partner.” When Steve _still_ isn’t doing anything besides making a complete and utter fool of himself, she slides into a chair at the bar, a slightly frustrated twitch pulling at her lips. “Oh-eight-hundred, Captain.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll be there.”

And then Steve grabs the beer the barkeep has just gathered for the squad and _flees_ back to their table, cheeks burning. He looks back, meets Bucky’s eyes; his best friend jerks his head at Peggy, lips pressed together, all _what the hell are you doing!_

Steve grimaces back, sits down to join the squad in whatever conversation they’re having and tries to work his way back up to something resembling courage. He’s never had any issues talking to Peggy, not since that first time when he accidentally called her beautiful and insulted her in the same breath. But she’s never looked at him like _that_ before. She’s always been direct, always challenged him, but that look, that daring, heated gaze. Steve just shut down, alright. He doesn’t have a lick of experience with being wanted.

He sneaks glances over his shoulder, catching snippets of Bucky trying to keep Peggy company while both wait for Steve to stop being an idiot and come back. It doesn’t look like a particularly stimulating conversation; their smiles are a bit too strained for that, but at least they’re getting along.

Steve turns back to listen to Morita’s story—something about a dozen eggs, a clothesline, and a horse—and calls himself a fool a million times over.

They’re a good way into said story, getting stranger and stranger, when the squad demonstrates the first reason Steve picked them all: good, common sense in the face of danger.

It starts with a bellow loud enough to wake the dead. “ _STEVEN GRANT ROGERS_!”

In the seconds it takes for the words to register, a number of things happen. First, the squads’ eyes all widen like startled deer. Second, they all scramble up, Monty literally crawling up the wall like a housecat to get away from Steve. It’s quite undignified. Gabe pulls Dernier away by the collar, both of them zigzagging around chairs to get out of the way. Morita’s somehow managed to snag his beer before running, and Dugan’s backed up far enough to be firmly out of range but still close enough to watch the proceedings.

Steve, for his part, has frozen in his chair, and slowly starts turning in his seat, a very fake, very stiff smile on his face. Bucky rips through the crowd, fire blazing in his eyes. Behind him, Peggy’s flapping her hands in a show of uncommon distress, mouthing ‘sorry’ at Steve. “ _You jumped on a grenade?!_ ”

 _Shit. Fuck._ “Well—”

“ _STEVE_!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter coming in a few days, it's already written!


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve goes through a learning curve (aka who you foolin' son).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> behold! an original chapter!
> 
> and guess who survived her exam! 'TIS I

Steve catches up with Bucky a couple of streets—blocks? Do the English use blocks as a measure of distance?—from their sleeping quarters, an old, requisitioned hotel that hadn’t been getting any customers anyhow. After cussing Steve out in front of all and sundry, Bucky had thankfully turned on his heel and stormed out rather than try to wrestle Steve to the ground right then and there.

Excusing himself to Peggy, to the bartender, the squad, the other patrons, everybody, and throwing some money on the bar, Steve had hightailed it out of there as well, tracing Bucky by the lines of startled people he’d left in his wake.

“Bucky! _Bucky_! Buck, come on, it wasn’t even a real grenade!” he tries as he comes up beside him, not even huffing from the cold air and exercise. Back before the serum, such a thing would’ve had him down and coughing within a minute.

Bucky bares his teeth, deftly avoiding Steve’s reaching hands. “Don’t talk to me.”

“Buck, I’m not going to apologize, even if it _had_ been real—”

“Of course, you’re not! You never apologize!” They’re yelling in the street now. Good thing they’ve reached a relatively abandoned area, the residents all having crept inside to comply with curfew and get a not-so-good-night’s sleep.

“That’s not fair—”

“Oh, really, tell me more about _fair_ —”

“You’d have done the same and you know it!”

“No, I fucking wouldn’t!”

“Yes, you would! If you’d seen the grenade and I’d been there, and you’d have known it’d take us all out if—”

“It would’ve been different then! It’d have been for you! But who was there, Steve? Who there was so important that you had to throw yourself down like your life doesn’t matter? All those assholes who didn’t even want to shake your hand? What good would your death have served to have them live?”

“Peggy was there, too,” Steve persists, teeth clenched in anger. Bucky _would_ have done the same. Bucky knows it, too, but he’s always been easily upset by Steve trying to be just like him. “And even if she hadn’t been, I still woulda done it.”

Bucky throws his head back and sighs, closes his eyes. His exhale fogs the air in front of him. Visibly letting his anger go, now he just looks sad; a sheen of wetness clouds his eyes. “God, why do you have to be so goddamned noble all the time?”

“It’s not being noble, it’s just trying my best,” Steve says. Bucky finally lets him catch his arm and squeeze it. They’ll get through this, too. The longest they’ve ever been at odds were the three days after Steve’s Ma’s funeral when Steve hadn’t wanted to let Bucky move in with him, too sad and angry to see it was more than charity. Bucky had made himself at home, anyway, unwaveringly kind even as Steve tried to push him away. If there’d ever been a time he would’ve been able to hate Bucky, that would have been it, and it never happened.

Bucky laughs in that restrained way he’s taken to, like a soft scoff that has a bit of vocalization at the end. It’s not a real laugh; his real laugh is wild and free, makes his face scrunch up like a little kid’s. This is a pale echo of that laugh’s last notes. “Trying your best, huh? Like you did in the bar just now?”

Steve flushes. “Shut up.”

“That was the most painful thing I ever seen, and I saw you trying to dance with Marjorie’s sister—”

“Please stop talking.”

“You wouldn’t even have had to do nothing, Stevie, all you’d had to do was look at her, you mook. Hell of a dame you got there.”

“She ain’t my dame.”

“Well, not with that attitude. Come on, don’t tell me the girls ain’t all over you now, looking like that in the middle of bunch of chorus girls.” When Steve remains quiet, Bucky grows a little more sober. “Hasn’t anyone of them pulled you aside and taught you a thing or two? You still ain’t been kissed?”

“I’ve been kissed, you know that.”

Bucky waves the comment away. “That thing with Yvonne don’t count.”

“Oh, now it don’t count?”

“It don’t and you know it, you said it yourself, you barely had time to feel it ‘fore it was over.” He shifts his weight, gaze weirdly intense. “Is it ‘cus you’re afraid, Stevie?”

“I ain’t scared,” Steve snaps back.

Bucky holds up his hands, consoling. “Inexperienced, then. You looked at her like she was gonna bite you back there.” Steve turns away, burning hot with embarrassment. Bad enough he had to live through it, he doesn’t need the commentary, too. “Hey, hey, no, it’s alright, Stevie. Ain’t nothing wrong with being a little nervous.”

They’ve come to a stop in a narrow alley close to their hotel. The night is cold, the sky is overcast. It’s dark as all get-out around here, the lamps turned down, just in case. Steve has stuffed his hands in his pockets, fingers tangling with the insignia pin. His skin is colder than the metal bars.

“Hey, Stevie?”

He turns; Bucky’s face is half-hidden in shadow, but Steve’s vision has vastly improved with the serum. He can just make out a few key features; the sharpness of his cheekbones, the soft curve of his lower lip, the shy flicker of his gaze. Bucky has never been shy a day in his life, no matter what he says. A few locks of hair have tumbled forward, curling over his forehead. Looking at him makes Steve about as choked up as looking at Peggy in her red dress did.

“If it’s just ‘cause you’re nervous—”

“Bucky, please, stop—”

“ _Listen_.” He steps into Steve’s space, close enough that his breath gently touches Steve’s face on each exhale. His eyes flitter about, now on Steve’s, now lowered, now bouncing around like expecting someone to be listening in on them. “It’s okay to be nervous. What I’m saying is, when it comes to Peggy, you don’t have to be.”

Steve bites his lip, looks away. “You got a cure for nerves in your pocket or something?”

“Well,” Bucky draws out the word. Slowly, he raises his hand, grabs onto Steve’s sleeve. “I’m just saying… you get your first kiss outta the way, get someone to show you the ropes, you don’t gotta be so antsy next time. It’ll just be easy, yeah?”

Steve’s mouth’s gone all dry. His heartbeat seems so loud in the quiet of the night; can Bucky hear it, too? Maybe the serum has stopped working and his heart is the first thing to regain its off-beat rhythm. “I’ve been kissed,” he protests, just to be sure nothing else spills from his lips, something awful like _please_. Bucky’s not suggesting anything, he’s just trying to calm Steve, right? _Right?_

Bucky pulls him into the dark with him. They’re all alone, buffered by the faux-safety of night. “Not the way it counts,” he whispers.

Steve would protest some more, but Bucky’s lips are in the way.

*

Steve was sixteen and Bucky had just turned seventeen the first time they learned that being queer was about more than just sex.

Up until then, they’d only ever heard talk about it in either significantly unflattering terms or as a sort of deviant, out-of-control lust that seduced honest folk from their good, little lives. Some fellas even said that it wasn’t queer as long as you were the one stickin’ it in, not takin’ it. It was a sin, they were told, more so than extramarital sex between a man and a woman, and a crime against nature to boot. And so, Steve had never mentioned wanting Bucky like that in his confessions, even if the shame of it sat heavy on his shoulders.

But that night, a few days into April, Bucky and Steve had happened to spy a pair of fellas from their perch on the fire escape. Steve had been coming down from an asthma attack and trying to get as much fresh air into his lungs rather than the stuffy, stale apartment air, and Bucky had been keeping him company (and making sure that Steve wouldn’t get cold and come down with something even worse). They hadn’t had money for any Asthmador cigarettes that week, so cleanish air was their best bet.

The two men had moved through the shadows, chasing one another like children, their laughter uninhibited in the way that only things that happen in the safety of night can be. The first one, a tall, slim guy, caught up with his lover and kissed him so passionately that even Bucky’s usually unflappable façade dropped in sheer astonishment. Entranced by the sensuality of it in the way only teenagers can be, they hadn’t been able to look away despite warnings railing at them at the taboo of it all.

But while the embrace had started out as sexual, it quickly became simply intimate, the two men holding one another like there was nothing more precious in the world than their partner. _I love you_ , they had whispered; the words had carried to the fire escape, and something in Steve had clicked into place like _oh_ and he’d recognized himself in them. These were no deviants; they were just two men.

As they disappeared like ghosts in the fog, Steve had glanced at Bucky, just a tiny peek to gauge his reaction. To his surprise, Bucky had already been looking at him, turning quickly away, cheeks pale.

“We weren’t supposed to have seen that,” Bucky had said. “No one was. It’s no one’s business.”

Steve had agreed, and soon after they’d met Arnie Roth and the relative normalcy of his person had further cemented the fact that loving another man was nothing sinful.

But it was that night that Steve stopped feeling ashamed.

*

Now, Bucky kisses Steve softly, testing that he’s not about to get punched in the face for his troubles. It’s just little nips at first, his lips a little chapped from the cold, but so, so careful. He tastes like cheap whiskey, smells like plain soap, skin, and home. He’d shaved that morning; his stubble is coming in, scratching at Steve’s skin.

When Steve just stands there passively, unable to move with how much he’s praying that this isn’t all an elaborate dream, Bucky’s hands come up to slowly frame his face, shaky fingertips first, then more confidently when Steve shivers at the touch.

“Like this,” he breathes, the words dancing over Steve’s lips.

He presses a little closer, holds them together a little longer, just waiting for Steve to mimic him. Steve is shaking out of his skin, trembles working their way from his heart to his fingers and toes. The next time Bucky pulls back, he follows, clumsily kissing back.

Surprised, Bucky lets him. Presses into it, firmly returning it.

Nothing’s ever felt this good.

“Like this,” he says, and Steve’s quick to follow his lead, parting his lips. The noise of it drives him mad, the slick click of their mouths, the sharp suddenness of their exhales. Without consciously permitting it, his hands come to rest at Bucky’s waist, pulling him so close they can feel each other’s heartbeat through their uniforms. Bucky gasps, bites at Steve’s lower lip and sends a frisson of liquid fire straight through him.

Whining, he kisses back harder, wanting Bucky’s teeth back in him. It makes Bucky hum low in his throat, a short, sweet sound before he starts pushing Steve back, not stopping until they bump up against the wall. His hands are in Steve’s hair, pulling at his head to maneuver him just the way he wants him. Their teeth clack together when Steve gets too eager, but Bucky just slows him down, kissing like they don’t need air to breathe.

“Like this,” he whispers shakily, darting his tongue out to taste Steve’s mouth.

A moan works its way out of Steve’s throat despite his best intentions to keep it in. Bucky shushes him gently, kissing him harder to stifle any sounds that might get them in trouble. Eager to follow, Steve licks at Bucky’s tongue, a bit too overeager perhaps. It makes Bucky giggle, makes him part his lips, painstakingly slow and teasing, tongue darting in to taste.

When they finally part, they’re both breathless, gasping and shivering and not from the cold. Steve’s hard in his slacks, hips twisted nervously away so that Bucky won’t feel it. This is just practice, it’s not real, it’s not because Bucky wants him.

“Just like that,” Bucky says, sotto-voce and rough.

And just like that, Steve knows he’s had the only kiss he’s ever truly wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ain't that sweet  
> now guess why one of Bucky's trigger words as the winter soldier is 17  
> Hint: the same reason that steve's own word woulda been 16 if he'd been the soldier
> 
> disclaimer: i'm not sorry


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve is a mess and the Commandos come together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everyone who's commented, read, and left kudos! it makes me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH on the inside and i hope my replies aren't too dumb.  
> the next couple of chapters will maybe be a little bit long time coming, 'cus it's largely gonna be non-canon specified ops and incidents that give a better sense of the Howlie dynamics than the montage in the movie (hopefully).  
> until then: thanks again!

Steve would like for all future records to state that what happens while he’s waiting for Mr. Stark to call him in is only fifty per cent his fault (future records won’t bother even mentioning the incident, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment. Possibly, Lorraine had felt a little guilty about it afterwards and kept it to herself).

What happens is this:

Steve’s sitting around at the SSR London headquarters on a cold, murky morning. Mentally, he’s miles away—or rather, hours behind and lingering in the aftertaste of a kiss and a sigh and a _just like that_. When he woke up that morning, he hadn’t been sure it’d actually happened, had tried to retrace every step to make sense of where it ended, unsure he was actually awake even now.

Bumping into Bucky in the hallway nearly had him convinced it’d all been a dream; Bucky’d been nothing but slightly grumpy the way he’s always in the early hours, messy-haired and pink-cheeked with sleep. He hadn’t acted different or said anything out of the ordinary, so how could it possibly be different from all the times Steve had dreamed about having him only to have had nothing at all come dawn? But it’d been real, even if Bucky couldn’t quite face it in the light of day; Steve had known from the way his eyes dropped when Steve’s gaze had lingered briefly on his lips, had recognized it the sudden bashfulness of his posture, so familiar from all the times Bucky and a girl had gotten a little too handsy with Steve just a room away.

Only this time it hadn’t been a girl who’d gasped for Bucky’s kisses. But it was _just like that._

Across from him, seated behind a large desk and watching him above her newspaper, is a pretty, young private called Lorraine. Steve has never encountered her before, but he’s not too unobservant to note that while she’s draped behind that desk like every secretary in a bluesie—all impish smiles, big, blue eyes, and perfectly curled golden hair—come to life, there’s a sharp, calculating air to her that he’d be stupid to underestimate. Maybe she’s like Peggy. Maybe she’s just filling as a secretary while there’s nothing else to do. Or maybe she’s one of Howard’s—but that’s unkind.

She’s just a little unnerving, that’s all.

“I read about Azzano,” she tells him suddenly, folding her newspaper delicately and tossing it. It makes him jump in his seat. “Quite a feat.” She’d sound bored if it wasn’t for the huskiness of her voice.

Steve struggles to look her in the eye, nervously fumbling with nothing. “Oh, yeah, well that… that’s, you know. Just. Just doin’ what needed to be done.” It makes him sound selfless. And maybe freeing the other soldiers had been brave, but it wasn’t why he’d been there. But let’s not dwell on that.

“Sounded like more than that,” she comments, keen as a lioness.

“Really, it’s not a big deal,” Steve tries.

She stands, heads for the shelves. “Tell that to their wives,” she says with an elegant shrug that ripples through her body like the most exquisite shiver. Steve’s been around chorus girls for months and he’s never been this intimidated by someone so beautiful. Except Peggy—and God, he really fucked that up last night. _Just like that._

“Uh, I-I don’t think they were all married.”

Lorraine hums. She’s raised herself up on her toes, straining for a file just a little out of her reach.

“Let me get that,” Steve offers, rushing forward with all the grace of a newborn elephant.

It’s a piece of cake for him to pull the file from its high shelf, and he turns to hand it to Private Lorraine with a shy smile. Bucky would laugh if he could see him, still all puppy-dog eagerness to be liked. But while he’s been fumbling for the file, Lorraine’s stepped in closer, having not moved away when Steve stepped up. Now, she’s practically pressed up against his chest, unintentionally dwarfed by his size and looking pleased as punch to be there.

“Thanks, Captain,” she purrs, leaning in and _—_

“Captain!”

Steve stumbles backwards like he’s been caught necking in the library stacks. Peggy stands in the doorway, dressed down in a white shirt and pencil skirt, hands clenched by her side and an angry flush working its way into her cheeks. Her dark eyes are blazing. Steve is going to _die_ and he’ll half deserve a gruesome end _._

“We’re ready for you. If you’re not otherwise occupied,” she snaps, voice like a whip like in those long-ago days of bootcamp.

Flustered enough to apologize to Lorraine—despite this really being none of his fault, right? _Right_?—Steve runs from the office, desperate to catch up to Peggy. “Peggy, Peggy, wait—”

“Agent Carter,” she corrects.

 _Shit_. “Agent Carter, please, that wasn’t—it’s not—whatever that looked like, it’s not what you think—”

“I don’t think anything, _Captain_ ,” Peggy informs him saccharinely. Her smile looks like it physically hurts. “Not one thing. You were just doing as soldiers do. Congratulations, Captain, you’re now a soldier like all the rest, just like you always wanted to be.”

That’s low, and it stings, and maybe Steve’s not thinking quite clearly; his brain is firing all the instances in which he doubted his standing with Peggy at him so fast it’s nearly a blur, so instead of trying to take the high road, what comes out is: “Well, what about you and Stark? Haven’t you two been— fondueing?” Regret hits the second he’s done talking.

Peggy spins to stare at him, lips pinched in fury and something hurt in the way she’s holding herself. “You don’t know a bloody thing about women, Captain Rogers, and with an approach like that you never will.”

*

Steve doesn’t know how Howard Stark hears about his nightmare-inducing blunder in the few short moments it takes for him to walk from where Peggy’s abandoned him in the middle of the compound, but when he walks into the lab, the man is already looking at him pityingly. He pats Steve on the shoulder, getting momentarily distracted by the muscle under his hand. “Fondue is just cheese and bread, my friend,” he explains like he would to a two-year-old.

Steve winces.

Thankfully, Stark couldn’t care less about Steve’s idiocy and quickly leads him to a long table on one side of the room. It’s filled with a variety of combat-related objects; a pair of pants made of a some kind of extra tough material (carbon polymer, to withstand an average German bayonet—“though Hydra’s not going to come at you with a pocket knife,” Stark snarks), an assortment of handguns and revolvers, one of which is a simple Colt that’d fit perfectly in Steve’s hand, and last, but most interestingly, a round, silvery shield that looks almost comically outdated compared to the rest of the weaponry and the HYDRA guns that they’d brought back from Azzano.

“I hear you’re kinda attached to that aluminum thing they had you running around with on stage,” Stark says, “And that other fella, what’s his name—something B? Bailey? Bradley! Yeah, he requested one and reports say he’s grown quite adept with it, so obviously you were gonna get one, too.”

“It’s handier than you might think,” Steve says, eyes a little narrowed at Stark’s casual disregard for Isaiah Bradley. “And First Lieutenant Bradley’s not the kind to muck about.”

“Mm, never met ‘im. He was before the army came crawling for help with Project Rebirth.” _And since you’re not part of his story, he doesn’t matter, huh?_ “Anyhow, there are other models than that one, if you’d rather have electric relays or something a little more fancy-looking, but I’m telling ya, when we tested this beauty it was flawless. Carter even cracked a smile.” He laboriously hefts the shield, hands it to Steve. It’s heavy and light at once, like it’d withstand anything but not be a hindrance. “Vibranium. Stronger than steel and a third of the weight. Completely vibration absorbent. One of a kind.”

Steve runs his free hand reverently over it. It’s an odd sensation, like there’s a little static between his skin and the silver surface. “How come it’s not standard issue?” _‘Cause it sounds like it could do a lotta good in the field._

Stark snorts. “That’s the rarest metal on earth, Rogers. What you’re holding there? That’s all the Vibranium we’ve got.” His clever eyes trace the concentric design of it, almost as possessively as he sometimes looks at Steve.

Footsteps approach. “Captain Rogers’ squad have arrived.”

Steve turns to Peggy, heartbeat speeding up at the sight of her. Instant regret and Stark’s blunt explanation of goddamn _fondue_ has stolen the hurt and panic from his body, and all Steve wants is to put things to rights. Behind Peggy, his men file in, all in their dress uniforms—or, in Dernier’s case, the least shabby clothes he’s been able to find, some of which appears to be the others’ based on how badly they fit his smaller frame. Bucky’s been as careless with his tie as he was last night. Steve looks away quickly, gut swooping.

Instead, he holds up the shield, tries a smile on for Peggy. It’s a little wobbly, but better than anything he managed at the pub. “What do you think?” he asks hopefully, eager for approval.

Cocking her head, Peggy purses her lips contemplatively. Then, before anyone knows what’s happening, she snaps up a gun from the table and aims it at Steve. Instinctively, he ducks, and just in time—the bullets _ping_ against the shield, bouncing off like raindrops. Someone is hollering; Peggy keeps firing until the clip is empty. 

When it’s over and Steve slowly lowers the shield, brows furrowed and knees a little wobbly, Peggy looks as composed as she’s ever been, rolling her shoulders back in satisfaction. Stark had thrown himself under the table when the bullets started flying and is now peeking out like a frightened mouse; by the door, the men all have a similar expression of baffled terror on their faces.

“It still works,” she informs them calmly, turning on her heel and walking out. “Gentlemen.”

The squad can’t jump out of her way fast enough.

Bucky turns slowly to Steve, jaw dropped. “What the fuck did you do?”

Steve can only whine pathetically.

*

It takes nearly a week to fully outfit and arm the Howling Commandos.

Personally, Steve’s pretty charmed by the name, constantly telling everyone who’ll listen how it reminds him of the stories Bucky’s Dad used to tell them about the outlaws of the old west. Dugan thinks it’s hilarious and has taken to howling whenever he spies the others across a room, much to the consternation of the officers manning the SSR war rooms. It doesn’t help that the other Howlies take up the noise at once, sounding more like a pack of deranged hyenas than anything wolf-like.

When the time comes for the first official photographs to be taken of the legendary-to-be Commandos, Christmas has come and gone, and they’ve already grown attached to the uniforms they’ll live, breathe, eat, sleep, and shake in when the horror hits and there’s nothing to do but ride it out.

Dugan’s in a broad-striped brown-and-black sweater (that somehow clashes slightly with his reddish hair), a heavy-duty tack-vest, and his ever-present bowler hat. Stark’s added his sergeant’s chevron to the front. Just for the photographs, his bushy mustache has been brushed and oiled into something almost charming.

Gabe and Morita are the most understated, favoring sensible army greens and heavy boots, an extra-dense helmet on Gabe’s head that’s been tested to withstand even the heavy-duty HYDRA guns. Morita just wants a cap to ensure the sun doesn’t get in his eyes. For the photos, Gabe shaves very, _very_ carefully, and rubs a nice, heavy cologne into his skin; Morita trims back his scruff a little, but still manages to look like he’s come straight from the field and couldn’t give a shit.

Monty has refused to blend in as an American—or at least look less British—and has stubbornly kept hold of his maroon beret, forcing Stark to add a Union Jack to the badge pinned proudly on the front. In addition, because there’s nothing Monty likes as well as being over the top, he has somehow gotten hold of a rather splendid neckerchief, making him look extra dashing.

Dernier is a bit more easily persuaded into dressing neutrally, only favoring a soft cap with a short brim that the photographer mutters about making him look ‘too French’, none of which makes any sense and only has the rest of the Commandos mocking him in broken French under their breaths. With his hawkish nose, expressive brows, and well-kept mustache, Dernier has the air of a silent film actor, and is about charismatic in his pictures, somehow communicating a certain sense of Chaplin-esque daring with a single look.

Last, but not least, and by far the most beautiful to Steve’s humble artist’s eye, is Bucky. Bucky, who’s taken care to shave and slick his hair back every day since they left Italy, is eye-catching wherever he goes, but in his new, navy blue jacket there’s no one quite like him anywhere else in the world. It’s more like an old-timey riding coat than a military jacket and has big buttons and deep pockets. He stands for his picture, eyes smoldering and pout firmly in place, and looks nothing like the boy who stuffed Steve into a photobooth on his last day in Brooklyn so many months ago. That picture’s still in Steve’s trunk, buried between the pages of a worn sketchbook.

And, of course, there’s Steve. While unable to escape the reputation and recognition being Captain America has gotten him, his own gear has at least been updated to not include nylons, and also some pants that don’t end right under his ass cheeks. It’s still red, white, and blue, but muted to something a little paler and more greyish so as to better blend with… okay, Steve doesn’t actually trust that it’ll blend with anything except an American propaganda poster, but he hasn’t had a lot of artistic input. At least it’s made of that polymer material that Stark was all excited about, durable and flexible just as it needs to be.

A large silver star rests in the center of his chest, and little, silvery wings curve around the sides of his cowl. To his secret delight, those same wings appear somewhere on the other Howlies’ gear; Bucky’s curl around the sides of both his shoulders.

And the shield… the shield has been painted, too; broad, concentric circles of red and naked silver until it reaches the blue center, and then a great silver star to match the one on Steve’s chest.

As December comes to an end and 1943 turns to 1944, Captain America and his Howling Commandos go to war.


	19. 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Howlies at war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> get thee ready for a surprise cameo!

They shoot out Steve’s tires as he’s coming up on the HYDRA blockade-turned-camp, sending him crashing to the ground, and his motorcycle—an absolutely swell, modified Harley Davidson WLA, colloquially called a Liberator—flipping over his head, but thankfully not landing on him. To be perfectly frank, it pisses him off; that bike ain’t done nothing wrong. In the back of his mind, he hopes that the fall looks less awful than it feels, because he’s not really in the mood to be yelled at for recklessness, and he is going to be wishing it’d at least knocked him out if that’s not the case.

Scraped up and bruised, ears ringing slightly, he’s already surrounded when he gets to his feet.

The HYDRA soldiers are dressed for the cold and armed with the heavily modified guns that Schmidt keeps tinkering with, making them more and more lethal. It runs Stark ragged to keep up back at headquarters, being only the one man—a brilliant man, mind, but one a little more restrained by not having slaves to assemble his guns. Behind the soldiers loom the hastily erected but nonetheless rather impenetrable camp that’s been keeping a great many Allied soldiers first pinned and then prisoners for months, greatly abetted by temperamental German winter storms.

On the gates is the giant, red skull-and-tentacle insignia. If anyone asked Steve—and no one did, not even Bucky, probably knowing the rant such a question would set off—he’d like to know how a skull and some tentacles have anything to do with the Greek hydra. Those just had a lot of heads, didn’t they? Why name a division after a creature they couldn’t even be bothered to replicate—especially when their soldiers all spout the same bullshit about cutting off one head only to have another take its place. They obviously know the myth, so why the weird art choices?   

Again, not that anyone’s asked.

Knowing better than to touch him, the soldiers keep their guns training on his head. They spit orders at him in German, and even if Steve doesn’t speak a whole lot of German, the tone is enough. _Get moving_ , he’d guess they say. Though probably with more vitriol.

He’s frog-marched towards the gates. From the walkway above, snipers keep watch for his men in the underbrush, their eyes peeled for any sudden movements. It’s a well-defended area, almost more so for having started out as a blockade and then turned into a holding spot as the Nazis started encountering more and more resistance. That’s not even to mention the pressure to not cede ground as the Howlies worked their way to them, blowing up established HYDRA bases and factories and salting the earth in their wake. As far as Steve knows, there could be anywhere between five hundred to two thousand men in there, penned in and freezing and waiting for a rescue that just hadn’t seemed likely until now.

A tall, imposing man in a long, stylish jacket comes striding out to meet them, appearing almost disgustingly satisfied with himself. He looks Steve up and down, taking in the red-white-and-blue uniform, the shield strapped across his back. He snaps his fingers and a small squadron moves out, likely to look for the Howlies. Steve takes care to keep his hands visible, feeling almost like a magician about to perform a subtle trick. _Don’t look at this_ , he’d say, waving a bright handkerchief in the air. _Look at that!_

“Did you really think you’d take us down so easily, charging our gates like a battering-ram?” the tall man says. His English is good, if somewhat heavily tempered by an accent. The insignia on his coat is a longish, intricate knot with two sunbursts; an _oberst,_ equal to a colonel.  “Were you really so desperate?”

“Nah,” Steve drawls, all Brooklyn-lazy. “I just needed your attention.”

As if on cue, a bullet whizzes past Steve’s ear, aimed right at the _oberst_ ’s forehead. The shot sends him stumbling back, grey matter spattering in the dirty snow. Instinctively turning towards the shooter, the soldiers spin away from Steve; it seals their fate.

Slipping the shield from its harness, Steve gets moving.

Anyone who’s ever said that fighting is like dancing is a goddamned liar. Sure, you sometimes move _with_ your opponent, anticipating his hits, try to avoid slipping. But no dancing has ever been so brutal as fighting, has ever had to account for the pain and desperate need to get your enemy before he gets you. If dancing back in Brooklyn had been about injuring your partner, Steve’s stepped on enough toes to have been called the reigning warlord of the dancehalls.

By now, only two short months into the new year, Steve’s learned to move as if the shield is an extension of him—a detachable extension, but still. The first time he’d thrown it at an opponent and had it bounced back had been unreal. Now, it’s instinctive; he barely needs to look at it, body turning to receive it upon its return.

As he smashes his way through the soldiers, Bucky’s aim remains true, picking off the snipers on the wall before they could get a good shot in. Still, with so many people and all their focus on Steve, it’s a never-ending job to see him safely through. Steve has to pull his own gun, a slightly modified Colt that he’s nowhere near as fond of as Bucky is of his—and that’s not to mention his Johnson rifle.

By the time Steve makes it through the gates, he’s killed eleven men and wounded many more. The number settles in his gut, but his mind doesn’t allow him to dwell on it. After the first few missions, killing became almost easy. That alone shakes Steve more than the actual killing, the ease and absence of guilt—and how horrible is that? Being more worried for your own relief than the deaths you’ve caused? But then, maybe he’d be more outraged if the men he’d killed weren’t Nazis. There are no innocents here.

They rush him at once, soldiers and soldiers and soldiers milling around like angered bees. In such close quarters and with just one target shooting is a liability, and more than one man goes down from friendly fire. Steve twists and weaves, ducking bullets and tearing through as many men as he can, teeth bared savagely.

In the back of the blockade, a shout goes up, cut off to a gurgle.

The Howlies have made it through.

See, the front gates were the only way through the blockade as far as the Germans knew. Defending the rear must have seem a waste of time as no other Allied battalions would have been positioned to come up from behind; the fortifications and barricades have been assumed to be enough against sneak-attacks. But Steve and his team have been staking the area out for a week straight, carefully unnoticed. It was Jones who came up with the idea upon spotting an abandoned fox den a short distance from the wall. All they’d needed to do was climb in and dig a tunnel, something the foxes (and possibly a badger and some wolves, given the width of some of the tunnels) had already been doing before vanishing—thankfully so, or they’d have been fucked what with the frozen ground. Dernier was small enough slip through the tunnels, carefully widening them to fit even Dum Dum’s girth. It wasn’t about making it stable enough to crawl back out, it was all about getting in.

Privately, Steve’s glad he didn’t have to go down into the earth.

Now, covered in mud and wide-eyed from the oppressive claustrophobia of a space previously meant to fit a smaller mammal, the Commandos rush forward, howling as they go. Dum Dum plows through them savagely, not even stopping for breath. Morita, like Bucky, has the eyes of a hawk and has taken up position at the edge of the battle, picking off soldiers as quickly as he can. Gabe covers Dernier as the latter lobs grenade after grenade into tents and sleeping quarters, and Monty wields a gun in one hand and a dagger in the other.

As some of the soldiers’ attention finally slips from Steve, he makes his way up the wall. Bucky’ll be arriving with the cavalry any time now, a mix of Allied soldiers having marched to meet them. It’s imperative that they get through the gates.

Nine more men fall by Steve’s hand. One he breaks the neck of by chucking him over the side of the wall. Another he punches so hard the ribs crack—a triple salute of _pop, pop, pop!_ —piercing his lungs and leaving him breathless and drowning. Three more he shoots, the rest he kills by hand. The second they take their last breaths, his mind banishes their faces from his thoughts. They are simply enemies. In war, there’s either killing, or dying. (And, seventy percent of the time, waiting).

Somehow, that’d seemed almost glorious back in Brooklyn. What a fool he was.

He keeps the gates clear, and Bucky leads the men through.

Overwhelmed by the prowess of the Howlies and the number of Allied soldiers swarming them, the Nazis either go down bloody or foaming at the mouth. None surrender, of course—those who aren’t gunned down swallow pills instead.

In this battle alone, Steve has killed thirty-nine men. _Keep going. The men need you._

The prisoners are held in something that resembles a fortified pig pen, tied up like recalcitrant dogs. They’re as dirty and starved as the Howlies had been back in Italy, but almost worse for wear due to the cold, the quarters, and the disease that’s spread like wildfire. Twelve percent of them will probably die even now; dysentery has set in for some, gangrene for others. They’re sitting in their own filth, unwashed for weeks. The smell is indescribable.

Steve’s coming up on the pen when he senses it, feels the eyes of an enemy on the side of his face, ducks behind the shield. A bullet bounces off it harmlessly, followed by another, and another, but the last is different. It’s not aimed at him, for starters, and the bang of the gun is different, familiar. Glancing over the shield, he spots Bucky.

Bucky stands over the twitching soldier like an avenging angel of death. He’s almost pristine compared to the other Howlies, a little dirty from his perch on the ground almost a mile away, a little sweaty from the fight. His hair’s come undone, locks falling into his eyes. And his eyes… his eyes are cold.

_Shit._

“Buck,” Steve calls, approaching quickly. Bucky’s still got the gun in his hand, face dispassionate as he stares down at the dying soldier. It’s not malice, of that Steve’s sure. There’d have to be anger or even hate in Bucky for it to be that, but Bucky’s not really there right now. It’s not quite like in Italy, none of the subsequent lapses have been. Bucky doesn’t stop functioning even when he shuts down now, thankfully a rare occurrence. Instead, he gets almost scarily sharp, taking out more men than should be possible. “Bucky, look at me.”

Bucky looks up. His eyes, that pale blue the most beautiful shade of all, are like ice, chilling Steve through and through. There’s nothing kind left in them, nothing of the streetwise kid Steve used to run with back in Brooklyn, the charmer who danced the night away, the friend who wrapped his knuckles and spit in the face of adversity. There’s only focus, nothing else.

“Hey,” Steve whispers, now close. He has to get Bucky out before their back-up notices. Soldiers are supposed to carry out their orders to perfection, but no one’s stopped to think that maybe perfection comes at a cost. If they see him, what’ll they do to him? “Come on, Buck, let’s get the men out, yeah?”

It takes a couple more tries until Bucky reemerges. He blinks, startled almost, but gets moving with his usual, more human focus. A frown stays heavy on his brows, carving a deep groove between them. Looking at him now, you’d never think there was anything wrong with him. It doesn’t seem to affect him, these states. They don’t have him shaking or crying or sleepless; they just happen.

But Steve knows it’ll be a bad night for all of them.

*****

Steve is stuck in a long post-combat meeting with the Allied officers and some of the freed high-ranking, less-wounded soldiers—one of which a New Yorker from an immigrant family like Steve and Bucky, a handsome, serious fella by the name of Sousa—for hours before he can finally escape and make his way to the Howlies’ camp. They’ll be heading east soon, barely able to stop and drop before needing to be on the move again.

The second he steps into their small camp, he knows he was right about it being a bad night.

Bucky’s already back in that emotionless state, keeping watch with sharp eyes that carry no trace of himself. At first, Steve had wanted to keep it secret, fiercely protective of even the other Howlies finding out about his episodes. It’d been a fruitless endeavor from the first, and dumb as hell to boot; the Howlies would never tell on them. Besides, Bucky only gets like this when the others are just as bad, as if he senses their minds faltering and retreats into himself accordingly.  

Dugan’s seated next to Bucky, his three-day bout of insomnia starting to show. His eyes are lined with sleeplessness, tired and yet horridly, desperately awake. Monty keeps checking his guns, disassembling and reassembling obsessively, the clicks almost comforting at this point. When he’ll have done so twenty-two times, he’ll start flicking his knives around. Morita’s bent over their cookpot, hiding the tremor in his hands by stirring whatever bean-mixture he’s managed to scrape together. Gabe and Dernier seems the best off, but given how Dernier is smoking like his life depends on it, that calm will be all forgotten come night time.

Steve grabs a bowl and spoon, settles in to eat.

He doesn’t quite suffer like the others do; his mind won’t let him. While in battle, the faces of the men he kills are discarded like yesterday’s bathwater, but afterwards, the sounds of their dying ring out as he sleeps. He never wakes from those nightmares, never twitches in the night. Instead, he’s paralyzed with horror, killing them again and again and yet dying the same way, stuck in the dream and unable to wake. In the morning, his body rises almost without his consent.

If he and Bucky are sleeping at the same time, Bucky’ll sometimes wake him, cold eyes calmly staring Steve down as if by doing so, his nightmares will back off, too. He’ll slip into a light slumber after, wide-awake the second Steve is either too still or moving too much. It’s a delicate balancing act.

Despite these troubles, Steve’s not lost his faith. It’s just that doing the right thing in war takes more of a toll than you’d think. It’s not pretty, not easy. It comes at a price. You’d think goodness was easier than cruelty, but it’s not. It carries the burden of sins committed long ago, struggles to survive like a child caught between two opposing trenches while bullets and bombs fall all around.

Who’s going to tell that child that one side is good and the other is evil, when both sides are shooting and no one cares to halt fire? Steve’d like to think that there’s a distinction, but the longer he’s at war, the more he doubts it. The Nazis are evil sons of bitches, that’s true, nothing will ever change that. But sometimes he doubts their side is much better; Isaiah Bradley, Gabe, Morita, Arnie and Sammy, his own mother and every immigrant in America, were they not all looked down on until suddenly they were useful? Is such an empire not as cruel as the one they’re fighting?

With a simple, strong squeeze of each Commando’s shoulder, Steve lets his men know that he’s there for them. It’s inadequate, no doubt about it, but it’s all he’s got. He can’t pull them from the war, and they wouldn’t want him to. Despite the nightmares and the horror, Steve doesn’t want to leave yet either. It’s the right thing to do, staying and fighting. It has to be.

He settles next to Bucky after gently ordering Dum Dum off to try and get some sleep.

Bucky flicks his gaze towards him, categorizing him as a friendly, and turns away. Times like these, Steve can only wait for him to snap out of it. Coaxing him works, but it puts him in a funk, and to be quite frank, he’s already been acting a little strange since that first day in Stark’s lab in London. First of all, he’d quickly grown very, _very_ hostile towards Stark, despite his previous admiration for the man. If the two were in a room together, you could bet your every penny on Bucky watching him like he was expecting Stark to suddenly pull a gun on them. “I don’t trust the way he looks at you,” he’d said when Steve pulled him aside, “like he _owns_ you or something.”

There’d also been the strangeness that had arisen after Steve’d confessed why Peggy’d used him for target practice. The second he’d mentioned Private Lorraine, Bucky’d gotten an odd twitch around his eyes, even when Steve’d emphasized that nothing had happened. Still, Bucky’d quietly kept looking at him with a tensed jaw, almost like he was mad as mad as Peggy. When Steve’d finally confronted him about it before shipping out, Bucky’d just stuck his chin out in a particular obstinate way. “Didn’t think you’d need more practicing before kissing Carter,” he’d snapped under his breath, then stormed off. Steve’d just stood there blushing, remembering the taste of whiskey and home.

Thankfully, Steve’s pitiful expression and constant presence had worn Bucky down, and they’d quickly settled back into their usual ways. But Steve couldn’t get it out of his head, kept remembering the burning in Bucky’s eyes as he’d heard about Lorraine. Had Peggy truly charmed him so much that he already felt like she was Steve’s best girl, thus taking any slight against her as a slight against himself and Steve? Even then, Peggy’d more than made her displeasure heard. There was no need for Bucky to be pissed on her behalf.

And if a secret part of Steve wanted him to be angry on his own behalf about someone other than him trying to kiss Steve, well. That was for only Steve to know and never speak of. Besides, it wouldn’t make sense when Bucky’s championing Peggy for him. Why be jealous of one but not the other? _Stop dreaming, Rogers. It’s never gonna happen. It was just practice._

Not for the first time, Steve curses his devoted heart.


	20. 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> downtime and the creation of That Film Reel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why is this chapter so long

Bucky grabs him the second Steve walks out of the dressing room, eyes wild. “Steve, you gotta do something. It’s gotta count as defamation of character, I don’t even fuckin’ _look_ like a kid—Steve! Steve, _stop laughing_! I’m twenty-seven fucking years old, I ain’t no teenage sidekick! _Steve!_ ”

As he rambles, he waves a copy of _Captain America and the Howling Commandos_ around like a flag. They’ve been back in England for a few days, recalled from the front both to report to command in person _and_ to work on a new series of propaganda reels for Senator Brandt. The ones they’d done before shipping out back at the turn of the year had been so well received back home that every single Commando had started getting fan letters. Seeing this, Brandt had wasted no time bullying the army and the SSR into making time for more.

While on missions, the Howlies don’t have much contact with the rest of the world. what they do have is a radio—maintained and operated by Morita, who takes care to keep their code updated and convoluted in case any enemies manage to crack their frequency. You don’t exactly gossip on that. As a result, the popularity of the comics and the many fan letters have been waiting for them in England. Until now, Bucky, who’d been overjoyed with the letters, hadn’t known about his illustrated doppelganger, but within minutes of being back that had all changed.

It’s been two days and he hasn’t shut up about it since.

The illustrated version of Bucky Barnes is a naïve sixteen-year-old kid in a domino mask. His blue jacket (and the name, of course) is about the most accurate thing about him. Bucky is particularly offended by not only his age, but also his tiny blue shorts and red nylons. Steve’d nearly wept with laughter and kept asking whether Bucky’d keep the outfit—and God, how Bucky had blushed and cussed at that.

“They’ve gotten everyone else mostly right, why the fuck am I a kid?” Bucky moans, theatrically sliding down the wall in despair. “I’m nearly smaller than you were, ain’t no one havin’ issues with a child soldier? Look, Ma even wrote me a birthday card! I’m not a damn kid!”

Bucky’d turned twenty-seven just last month, the exact hour and minute of his birth passing them by as they’d been crouched and shivering in a trench. They’d been coming up on day three of near-starving, half-delirious with thirst and hunger and sleeplessness. Nothing had really made sense except for the bullets and booms all around them, yet Steve had still had the wherewithal to remember Bucky’s birthday. Gabe had belted out some pretty good renditions of every birthday song he’d ever known as Bucky popped up from the trench like a demented gopher, making unbelievably accurate headshots. Even now, Steve’s half-unsure whether he’d dreamed it all.

“Any idea what we’ll be filming today?” Bucky grumbles from his slumped position, still pouting.

Steve shrugs, gestures at the set. “Some kinda strategy meeting, I think. They’ve got all these maps laid out over there.”

They’re at a small film set somewhere near Dover, more an appropriated haybarn than anything grand. Since arriving, the Commandos have been through the beauty wringer, hair and beard trimmed back—almost forcibly in Morita’s case. Out in the field, that sort of thing doesn’t matter much; it’s mostly about keeping your hair out of your eyes and not getting dirt in any open wounds.

And the food—good God, they’d finally had enough food. Nothing amazing, not even something really flavorful, but lots and lots of it. There’s never enough in the field; Steve eats more than twice the amount of any of the Commandos, and Bucky can almost match him—it might be a reaction to being held in that lab or something, no one can really explain it. Steve tries to slip Bucky some of his extra rations, but Bucky just slips them right back. It’s a stalemate.

They’d not been polite company at the dinner table that first night back, that’s for sure.  Hopefully they’ll have filled up and have pounds to spare for the lean months ahead.

It’ll be a few more days before they’ll ship out again, but it’s still a very short time to get everything filmed and in order. Between takes, they’ve been encouraged to answer a few of their letters, autograph some comics to ship back to the states. Bucky’s pique over the comics almost overshadows his joy at his sister’s news from another, more personal letter: Becca’s pregnant, expected to deliver the baby sometime in the early fall. He’ll be an uncle; he can’t wait to hold his niece or nephew, won’t stop talking about at the dinner table. Bucky’s always loved kids.  

“Why would we have a table in the middle of a forest?” he asks now, waving his hand at the painted forest-background that serves as backdrop for their set. “Even if it was for Command, it’d be in a fuckin’ tent.”

“We’re trying to chase down a man with a red skull, Buck, sense ain’t really applicable ‘round here. Besides, don’t think anyone’s focused on the backdrop when I’m prancing around in that suit.”

“Still think you shoulda kept the old outfit,” Bucky wheedles.

“I will if you will,” Steve says, nodding at the discarded comic issue.

That only sets off another rant, Bucky clearly working up steam as he bolts upright, flushed again. Before he can get really into it, however, a production assistant comes rushing over. He’s a slim fellow with a twitchy nose, glasses fogged with perspiration, and the look of ragged mania in his eyes. He nearly skids to a stop in front of Steve, pushing the compass they’d taken off of him into his hand. “We need this in the middle of the table, open and turned towards the camera,” he informs Steve. “Give it a few seconds, then snatch it away and put it in your pocket.”

Steve frowns. Why does the compass matter? It’s standard army issue, nothing fancy, points north like any compass. Curious, he flicks it open, nearly dropping it when he sees the picture now adorning the inside. Peggy smirks out at him, half-turned towards the camera; it’s definitely not an official photo, that much he’s sure of. Where the Hell did they get this?

“I don’t—” he stammers. It seems wrong to carry her image around like that, presumptuous at best and over-stepping at worst, especially given the way they’d left things in London. She’d shipped out before Steve could find her and apologize, some top-secret mission from the SSR.

“The people respond well to romance,” the assistant tells him, a little prissily.

“Did  Pe—Agent Carter give you this?” Steve has a hard time believing that.

“Howard Stark did, said the two of you were close. Now remember, face up, turned to the camera.”

Steve’s going to wring Stark’s fucking neck.

While he fumes, Bucky plucks the compass from his hands. Freshly shorn and shaved and dressed in his blue jacket, he should look like everybody’s dream, braver and more handsome than a Hollywood star. And he does, mostly. But there’s something pinched at the corner of his eyes, a downturned edge to his smiles that Steve keeps getting lost in. Bucky’s not had a bad turn for over a month now, but the threat of it persists, making Steve nearly irrational with worry sometimes.

“She really is a Hell of a dame,” Bucky mumbles softly, looking down at Peggy’s picture. He grins, a little forced. “Too smart for a schmuck like you, but don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

Steve snorts. “Don’t go planning the wedding yet, you saw how it was when we last were in the same room.”

Bucky tuts. “You’ll apologize, she’ll forgive you. Just don’t go runnin’ around for any ol’ squeeze, yeah? You’d be good together, Stevie. Take on the whole world and win it, ain’t nothin’ stoppin’ ya.” And yet, he looks away, eyes sad. “Just promise me you’ll visit your ol’ pal every once in a while, yeah?”

“Barring the door wouldn’t keep me away, Buck.”

“End of the line, huh?” Bucky grins.

“End of the line.”

*****

Directing the Howlies is a lot like herding cats. Every one of them has got their own way of dealing with a camera in their face, and Steve’s the only one who has the least bit of experience and knows that doing what he’s told in this one instance will get them to leave him alone much faster. The same cannot be said for the rest of them.

Bucky pouts exaggeratedly at the camera like he’s trying to put every prostitute on the block back home out of a job. Monty, normally so charming, is too stiff, always a step behind the others and unnaturally mechanic in his movements. Morita simply doesn’t care to act, moving about like it’s just another goddamned day, ‘forgetting’ to have his face turned to the camera. Dernier tells raunchy jokes in French, setting Gabe off constantly—and given that the latter is otherwise the only one minimally comfortable and natural in front of the camera, it fucks up the whole endeavor. Dum Dum just keeps wandering out of the shot, distracted by something or other.

By the time they’ve finally filmed the scene, Steve snatching the compass away and looking briefly into the camera with an awkward wince—not hard, he _is_ really uncomfortable with the whole thing, what if Peggy thinks he stole a photo of her, then he’ll _really_ be in hot water—the director looks ready to tear his hair out.

The others are ordered to change back into their civvies while Steve is made to stay behind for solo shots. It’s almost more arduous a process than the former shoot, as they don’t really tell Steve what to do but expects him to understand it from vague instructions such as “look into the distance like it’s the future”, which: what?

Bucky’s snuck in to watch him, now back in that green shirt that he’d worn in Italy, unbuttoned at the top, chest hair and dog tags peeking out. He looks more debauched than should be possible for a guy who hasn’t gotten laid in months. It’s not like the Howlies are isolated all the time, sometimes meeting up with other battalions like in France, and there are plenty of nurses around in those instances, but Bucky never goes with one of them like plenty of other soldiers do. Hell, other soldiers make time with one another, too, quietly and carefully keeping it hidden, but Steve’s familiar with the secret intimacy from back home. Even before he witnesses at the front, Dum Dum draws him aside to inform him that it might happen, emphasizing the importance of keeping it quiet. Steve’d been surprised, something he’d later been ashamed of; Dum Dum, while devout, wasn’t the fire and brimstone type of guy, not like some of the people back in Brooklyn. Dum Dum doesn’t care what the soldiers do as long as they take care of themselves and their partners; it’s none of his business.  

From in front of the camera, Steve keeps flicking glances at Bucky, thoroughly distracted. Bucky’s filled out in the past months, against all expectations to the contrary. No longer skin and bones, there’s a heaviness to his shoulders there hadn’t even been there before the war, and yet he carries himself with a familiar swagger in quiet, vulnerable moments between fighting. He’s familiar and not; what might Steve look like to his eyes?

Frustrated at Steve’s lack of attention, the director ends up calling Bucky over.

“One would think you knew how to do this,” Bucky mumbles out the corner of his mouth, pout out in full force as he stares down the camera.

“And one would think you’d stopped making that face when you were ten, but here we are,” Steve jabs back, smirk barely held in check as Bucky throws his head back and truly laughs for the first time since Italy. Steve couldn’t take his eyes off him if he tried.

It gets easier then, posing for the camera as Bucky pokes fun at him and the world falls away. There won’t be any accompanying sound for the film reels, and thank God for that, or the whole of America would know how dirty Steve Rogers’ mouth is when faced with Bucky Barnes’ sly insults. It’s enough to make a few of the production assistants red in the face, their eyes wide with every new swear that spills from Steve’s lips, the words merely making Bucky goad him mercilessly.

When they finally get to dinner, the Howlies are all in high spirits and the beer is flowing freely.

Steve and Bucky sit slumped against one another, creating an awareness that burns through Steve at ever touch of naked skin on their hands and arms. Across from them, Monty’s obstinately defending his love of Jane Austen, more than a bit soused already and thus slurring his accent into something distinctly more working class than the posh crispness he usually falls into.

As the night goes on, their minds turn to home and stories of their families are shared with gusto, eventually—and perhaps rather obviously—turning to their love lives. No one’s married, but plenty of stories get shared about past lovers, the tales taking a turn for the rowdy as the liquor flows. Surprisingly, Steve’s not the only one not joining in; Dum Dum’s just as quiet, even when their talk concerns merely daydream desires, of which Steve has plenty.  

“Come on, Dugan, there’s no one back home for you?” Bucky wheedles, arm draped around Steve’s shoulders. He’s not nearly as drunk as all that beer should’ve made him by now. Doesn’t seem drunk at all, in fact.

Dum Dum seems almost a little shy as he picks at his plate, a red-hot flush working its way onto his Irish-pale cheeks. If there’s anyone here who flushes more obviously than Steve, it’s Dugan. He licks his lips, not meeting anyone’s eye directly. “There’s this girl—”

“ _Yes_ ,” they all cheer loudly.

“No, it’s not like that. She’s not my girl or anything, but… when I get home, I’m gonna ask to court her proper, if she’ll have me.”

“What’s she like? Give us somethin’ here, we all wanna know what kinda girl gets you all turned about—those chorus gals couldn’t even do that.”

“Well, that’s just ‘cus I got manners, you dumb fucks.” A roar of laughter meets that statement, even Steve chuckling. “But she’s… it’s an unbelievable story, actually. Cap, remember when I said I’d seen stranger things than you?”

The Howlies get really silent at that, disbelieving glances flying around. Even Morita’s leaning forward with interest, usually the most unflappable amongst them. At this point, they’ve all gotten pretty good with working around weird, what with Schmidt’s non-face, the prison camps, and Steve’s at times odd-as-Hell body making them rethink the way of the world. If Dum Dum says there are stranger things than that, it means it’s time to shut up and listen.

Dum Dum rubs his mustache, a wry, fond grin on his face as he starts to speak. His accent, normally pretty mellow, gets heavy, almost reminiscent of Steve’s ma’s, though not quite so lilting. “I grew up in Southie—South Boston—not too far from the docks. My da was a foreman there, so we’d always been around underfoot, all us kids. We knew the area better than our own backyard, have all fallen asleep to the chugging of the waves and the shouting of the workers. Ain’t nothing much around there that scares me but that night… I must have been, what, twenty-one, twenty-two? I’d been working late at the wharf I was apprenticing at, so when I headed for home it was long past dark.

“I heard this noise, nothing I’d ever heard before. Curious, and perhaps stupid with youth, I went looking for the source, even as something was telling me to run the other way, some primeval instinct or whatnot. The sound was coming from one of one of those big wooden boxes the shipping folk use for transporting all sorts of things, food, livestock, you name it. Now, I may be a city boy, but my ma’s family are all butchers, I’ve been around cattle and the like before, and I knew this wasn’t no such animal. But it _was_ some animal, I thought, desperate for air by the sounds of it—the box must have gotten knocked around during unloading and snapped all the way shut, and it wasn’t really made for animals in the first place, no airholes anywhere.

“I didn’t stop to think, just ran and grabbed a crowbar and got to work, jamming the box open. Now imagine my surprise when there wasn’t no animal in that box, but a girl, just as flummoxed to see me as I was to see her. She was dirty, had been in that box for months, starved, too, by the looks of it, absolutely pitiful to look at. But something… something told me not to underestimate her, maybe the look in her eye, like a cornered dog, or maybe the memory of those heavy sounds. So, I offered her my jacket and to get her someplace safe. I knew my mam would take one look at her and invite her in, so I wasn’t too worried about accidentally lyin’ about that. She didn’t understand a lick of what I said—spoke only Russian, I later found out, but we at least managed to introduce ourselves. Irina’s her name, and for some reason she trusted me not to hurt her.

“So, I brought her home and we took her in. I learned a bit of Russian, can hold a somewhat decent conversation, and Irina started picking up English real quick. She was reserved in those early days, careful never to have her back to us, but always good with the younger kids and very protective of them, so everyone was eager to overlook her oddities for free childcare. And me, well… she always seemed to trust me the most, wasn’t afraid to push into my space or look me in the eye, so much so that I once dropped an entire stack of plates ‘cus she smiled at me…

“Then one night, I was working late again, and she came to get me. She never spoke much, even on a good day, but she got her point across with a twitch of her eyebrow just as well, shamed me right into packing up for the night. But she didn’t bring me home, made me follow her to one of the older warehouses and snuck us in. I thought I had an idea of what was going on—we might not be encouraged to sow our wild oats and whatnot before marriage, but my parents had made sure we knew what went on between a man and a woman. So, there I was, wrecked with nerves and desire, half-gone on her since the first day I saw her, barely able to look away for a second when she turned to me and said: Tim, I am bear.”

The Howlies are silent. One by one, they look at one another, confused. “‘I am bear’?” Dernier is the quickest to repeat, then adds in French, “ _Am I misunderstanding_?”

“No, that’s what she said. I was just as puzzled as you are, standing there gaping like a fool. Then she started taking off her clothes—not like that, don’t you dare make that face, Barnes, I _will_ hurt you—just dropping them at her feet. And then, then suddenly, she just—well, she, she _changed_.” Dum Dum waves his hands to illustrate. “When she was done, she stood several feet taller than me, wider too, with fur and fangs fit to devour me on the spot. I woulda screamed bloody murder, but I had no air, nearly fainted from the sight. She wasn’t no ordinary bear either, didn’t look at all fuzzy, more like something out of a nightmare.

“When she changed back, she told me everything; she’d been taken from her town as a girl, chained up in a magic circle as hooded men chanted all around her. When she first changed, she broke from the circle, killed them all, and ran. Panic made her change back to human, allowed her to steal some clothes and food and stowaway in the box I found her in. She hadn’t cared where she ended up, only that it wasn’t where she started.” He leans back, taking a long sip of beer. “So, you see, fellas. Good ole Cap ain’t the strangest thing I’ve seen by far.”

Jesus fuckin’ Christ, the world’s weirder than Steve’s ever dreamed. What’s next? Robot men and ancient gods?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in case you were wondering: the Bear is an actual MARVEL character and I adore her. the genesis i'm using isn't the same as in the comics, where she's mostly a bear mixed with some human via Deathwalker magic (russians in marvel really like making bear-people, what the hell). neither is she and Dugan a couple as far as i know. HOWEVER, both are recruited to the Stark Seven and thus do know one another, and i love them both and wanted this, so there. canonically, she likes wearing pink, loves gin and dogs, and is a demolitions expert (and she's def like that in here too, though that might not be relevant at this point), and her name is one i made up 'cus her identity is still secret in the comics.


	21. 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Steve has zero chill

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> return of the Who U Foolin' Son-tag, 'cus these idiots are so, so stupid.
> 
> this chapter is NSFW.

It’s October, and Steve has almost forgotten what an ordinary life is like. The scrapes and sickness of his youth seem almost completely faded, each instance as distant from him as the stars themselves. However, some things shine brighter than ever: his mother’s voice, his and Bucky’s first apartment in DUMBO, Bucky after a hard day’s work, shiny with dirt and sweat. Those memories play like cartoon shorts behind his eyelids, disconnected from their original context.

Nothing but the war seems truly real. Europe’s cold and wet, the Nazis need to die, must be Tuesday. He doesn’t even feel guilty for the killing anymore, or guilty for not feeling guilty. Who’s got time for guilt when the next HYDRA battalion is already rushing at you?

Steve lies on his back in his and Bucky’s tent, drifting in and out of a dream that might as well be real for how life-like it is—the parts that don’t fit are simply glossed over and accepted without question. In the dream, it’s nighttime, one of those sleepless nights where everything is slow and quick at once, everything muddled and heavy; Bucky and Monty are playing improvised darts with a board carved into an unfortunate tree. Monty’s knives serve as the darts, and Bucky’s gotten really good with them, picking up the skill like he was born to hold knives in his hands all the time. Dum Dum’s leaning back against a giant, brown bear, it’s teeth grotesquely huge, but no one fears her. They know her name. Dernier, Gabe, and Morita are playing cards. Steve’s just watching, content.

Outside of the dream, it’s early morning. They’re probably not that far into October…. Probably. The days are a little hard to keep track of sometimes, so Steve measures time in events. The Allies landed on the beaches in Normandy on June 6th, Operation Neptune was a success; they’d gotten word of in on the radio. That day, Dernier had snuck under a tank and blown it sky high with nothing but improvised dynamite made from scraps. On July 4th, Steve had turned twenty-six, and every Commando had tried dancing with him, swearing up and down that their Captain wouldn’t embarrass them by not knowing. One of the things the serum has not cured Steve of: two left feet. Gabe had been the only one quick enough to jump out of his way, laughing and humming jazz melodies as he tried leading Steve around. Bucky’s just laughed at him, something that happened more and more often as he regained his smiles even as his episodes gaining in strength, sometime triggered by nothing. They’ve all gotten used to it.

All summer, Steve’s freckles have been coming out in force, his pale skin for once not burning in the sun. Bucky’s gotten all golden; Steve once saw a statue of Apollo that looked a lot like Bucky does now. On August 14th Gabe, too, turned twenty-six. They tried making a feast for him with their rations and whatever animals Monty could scrounge up in the forest (two fat rabbits, and a couple eels from the river. Never mind that none of them knew how to cook eel, no one got sick from eating it, so that’s a victory in Steve’s book). On August 22nd, during a brief stopover in France, Steve was introduced to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Talk about surreal.

The offbeat tapping of rain that’s either just starting up or just petering out keeps Steve company. It’s cold in the nights up here in some northern part of France, so most of the men are bundled up in their uniforms even when they sleep, but not Steve. He runs so hot now that and undershirt and some long johns are enough for nights like these. It smells musty in the tent, like old sleep and a little sweaty, mixed with the odor of bodies that have gone a few days since the last really thorough wash. The lake water is cold as Hell, not even Steve can pretend to enjoy it. It’d be unpleasant if they weren’t all so used to it by now.

He lies still, blinking up at the canvas and tries to figure out why he’s awake. There are no sounds of enemies approaching, and besides, Gabe has the watch. They’re safe—as safe as can be, at least. Bucky’s sleeping soundly, rolled on his side with his face turned towards Steve. His mouth’s slack and he’s drooling a little, and Steve’d curse himself for finding even that a little endearing, but he simply can’t summon the energy to.

So why is he awake?

He stretches, feels his ankles pop. Everything is pleasantly slow and lazy, and every touch feels heightened. His bed pallet even feels softer than normal and given that it’s only half a step above lying on the cold, hard ground, that’s quite a feat. That’s when he feels it; the tightness in his pants, the low hum of want in his gut.

He resists the urge to groan. Every night, every morning, every day on the USO tour, he’d felt the stirring of need like a constant ache, but it’d thankfully fizzled out a bit when he got to Europe. Maybe it was because he tired himself out every day, or maybe it was his body’s response to the anxiety and rush of everything happening. In any case, his sex drive has been slightly dormant for the most part, and he’s sustained himself by rubbing one out while Bucky’s got the watch and he’s mostly alone.

Waking up with a boner with Bucky right next to him is really fuckin’ inconvenient.

It’s not that it’s never happened before, even if you discount their time here. Back in Brooklyn, they’d almost always shared a room, if not a bed on the nights where everything seemed frozen, and they weren’t sure if Steve was going to last the night without something—some _one_ —to keep him warm. He’s jerked off with Bucky asleep in the next bed—knows Bucky has, too. He’s even heard him do it, pretending to be asleep and desperate with want as the slick sounds of skin-on-skin and quiet panting echoed in even his bad ear.

So why should this feel different? It’s nothing new, nothing they haven’t overlooked for one another before. It’s not even like Steve has never pictured Bucky above him while in the same goddamn room. Maybe it’s the memory of his kisses, the feel of his hands that Steve now _knows_ that makes it all so much more intense, as if before he could kid himself and pretend every single one of his desires didn’t fix on Bucky somehow or other. 

He wants to wait it out. He _does_. But the thrum has grown to a roar, an itch in his fingers and a skip in his heartbeat. It’s like being fourteen all over again. Bucky’s asleep; Steve can be quiet. Steve’ll get out after, air out the tent a little. He’ll never have to know.

Cautious but so, so impatient, he slides his hand into his pants, grinding his teeth against the sigh of relief that tries to escape. He can’t open his eyes, can’t turn his head; that’ll make it too real. Raising his knees a bit, he makes room to move his hand up and down more easily, growing harder with every touch. He’s already starting to drip from the tip, easing the glide of skin. God, he wants to let go, wants to let his breaths get loud; the need to keep quiet almost makes the whole thing worse, makes him want to add moans to the symphony of desire he’s desperately trying to contain. Bucky’s hand had been calloused from his rifle, what would that feel like against his c—stop thinking, stop it, he’s right there, _fuck_. His breath stutters out. _Don’t open your eyes_.

It’s quiet in the tent. Too quiet.

The awareness of being watched filters in slowly, like someone pouring deliciously hot water over him. His body knows before he does, flushing like crazy and straining towards release; the attention feels like prickling sunlight.

When his brain finally catches up, he stills, eagerness and anxiety caught in his throat. Almost too scared to look, he opens his eyes, just a little, a peek between his lashes, and turns his head.

Bucky’s pretty, pale eyes are blown wide with surprise, the irises nearly clouded by sleepy-dark pupils. His hair is a mess, too long once again, curling at his nape and behind his ears. His lips have teeth marks from where he’s bitten them to keep quiet.

“Sorry,” Steve whispers, hand still clutched around him, cock twitching. Bucky’s lips are so red, plump and perfect and Steve _knows_ their taste. A whine rises in his throat, but he forces it down.

“Don’t be,” Bucky whispers back hoarsely. “I’ll just—”

He turns onto his back, his head tilted slightly towards Steve as if he can’t really bring himself to turn away completely. Shame at getting caught burns through Steve, almost making him turn over, curl up, and die, but Bucky doesn’t stay still. He swallows, breaths coming a little quick. The blanket rustles; his hands are moving.

Steve doesn’t understand what’s happening until Bucky’s first long exhale, a sigh of pleasure.

“Are you—”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Bucky breathes. “It’s okay, right? Needs must and all.”

Steve doesn’t need to be told twice.

Trying to match Bucky, he slides his hand over himself, his cock now full on weeping. It makes him dizzy, makes him want to throw his head back and bare his throat, makes him want to reach out, but he doesn’t. Bucky’s never made time with other soldiers, this is just an extension of the roommate situation, it doesn’t count. He’s not like Steve, doesn’t want Steve like Steve wants Bucky, it’s okay, it’s fine, except it’s really not, but by God, it has to be.

Is it wrong to look? Probably, but where’s he supposed to keep his eyes? The roof of the tent, closed, turned away? What’s the protocol for this, Steve’s a fuckin’ virgin, he doesn’t know these things—wait, Bucky’s not a virgin, just got to do what he does, right? He flicks his gaze towards Bucky’s, can’t keep quiet when Bucky’s eyes are already on him, flickering all over his face as if trying to draw him in his mind. Steve moans.

Bucky rolls onto his side, panting, shushing him. “Gotta be quiet, Stevie.”

Easier fuckin’ said than done. Steve copies Bucky, rolling over so that their bodies curve towards one another like parentheses. He never looks away and neither does Bucky, even if they don’t look each other in the eye all the time. Steve’s enchanted by the movements under the blanket, wants to lift them off and see Bucky working himself over, wants to know if he flushes down there, if he gets wet like Steve. He licks his lips, and this time Bucky’s the one to whimper.

“ _Christ_ , Stevie.”

The sound of his voice, drenched in need, absolutely wrecks Steve, sending trembles and shivers through him, making him squeeze himself a little harder, thumb the head of his cock. It’s not enough and it’s too much, he can’t stay still, he wants to thrust his hips forward—why shouldn’t he? Bucky’s already watching, God, Bucky’s watching _him_ , watching Steve come apart. It feels so good, he can’t, _won’t,_ keep still, pushing forward.

Coming once won’t be enough; Steve whines.

Bucky surges forward, smashing their lips together clumsily. “Stevie, shh,” he admonishes in between kisses, lips never leaving Steve’s for long. Control is not an option, and sounds pour from Steve’s mouth into Bucky’s, Bucky erasing them with his lips. Desperate with it and on the brink of coming, Steve licks at him, and when Bucky moans Steve is _gone._

He comes with a rush, cock stiffening in his hand and breath gone from his body. Faintly, he can feel Bucky pressing kisses and praise into his skin, murmuring his name into the mole on Steve’s skin like it’s the only thing he needs. His movements have gone choppy as he, too, approaches his high.

Seized by the uncontrollable urge to be the center of Bucky’s want, Steve surges forward, almost chest to chest with Bucky as he licks into his mouth. He’s breathless, still hard. They haven’t moved out from under the blankets, aren’t touching anywhere except their lips, but it doesn’t matter. If he comes, if Bucky comes, that’s sex right? It’ll count; Steve _wants_ it to count, wants Bucky to be his first, wants to hold that truth secure in his heart and know it always.

He keeps running his hand over his cock, as hard and wanting as when they started, somehow not at all worn out from his first orgasm, tethering right on the edge of another. Bucky’s the one who can’t stay quiet now, desperate sounds passing between their mouths, getting louder when Steve whispers “Gotta be quiet, Buck, be quiet for me, shh, God, you’re doin’ so _good._ ” It drives Steve near mad, seeing that Bucky reacts to his words and his voice, to his kisses and his presence. He knows this wouldn’t have happened back home, knows they’re not doing this for love and all the other fancies Steve’s had in his head since seventeen, but he forces that away. It doesn’t matter. 

When Bucky comes, he takes Steve with him. The sight burns itself onto the backs of Steve’s eyelid, something he’ll never forget as long as he lives. Bucky’s mouth goes slack and he goes quiet, body tense as a bowstring. As he starts coming, he curls inward with each spurt of come, the smell sticking in Steve’s nostrils and sending him off just like that. God, if he could only see the mess between Bucky’s fingers, could see his cock kick in his grip, there’s nothing in the world that’d ever be more beautiful. He wants to tell Bucky, wants to shower him with praise and love, but he bites his tongue and groans through his own, second orgasm, really, truly a mess by now. 

He loses some time while he winds down, synapses firing slowly.

They’re still leaning towards one another, foreheads pressed together. Once past the need, the world filters in; they’ve both got morning breath, quite unpleasant, to be perfectly honest, but moving away would mean no more intimacy, and Steve’s not ready to let that go yet. Bucky’s languid in the afterglow, catlike in the way he rubs their cheeks together, scratchy and rough. It’s enchanting how completely stupid he is with it, dopy and lose and smiling, tongue oh-so-clever as he slowly kisses Steve back to earth, just one, long kiss with their tongues curling around one another. It’s slick, it’s a little stale, and it’s the best Steve’s ever had.

Reality comes crashing in as the mess in their pants gets uncomfortable. Everything smells like sex. Steve doesn’t know how to act, doesn’t know what to do or what to say. What if Bucky goes back to not looking him in the eye, like back in London after the kiss? What if he stops touching Steve casually, stops joking around and stops—

“Just like that, Stevie,” Bucky whispers like back in London. It was all practice. He’s looking away, nervous-like. His lips are kiss-bruised; Steve did that.

“Had a pretty good teacher,” Steve whispers back, voice the slightest bit unsteady.

The tension breaks when Bucky snorts, relief all over his face.

They’ll be okay.


	22. 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Commandos get to talk. Also, they find something in the forest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: discussion and descriptions of death and concentration camps. I don't know if it's triggering for anyone, but just in case. It's not in depth, but it's there, and it includes some depictions of violence.
> 
> On another note: I am white and neither Jewish nor American, so the experiences discussed by Dernier, Gabe, and Morita (and Steve, Bucky, and Dugan, for that matter) in this chapter are not something I have any personal experience with, and these barely scratch the surface of the racism, xenophobia, and bigotry that occured at the time (and still occurs around the world no matter where you are). Some of the opinions expressed (maybe especially Monty's) are probably too modern and heavily influenced by postcolonial theory (which is a totally awesome field of study, especially in literature!).  
> Hope i haven't fucked it up too bad!
> 
> When Dernier speaks, he speaks French, but I don't actually know French. Besides, it was quite a chunk of text and contextually important, so I've just written it out in English and put it in Italics instead. Patchwork solutions? Me? Perish the thought.

They don’t get to talk about it; almost the second Steve and Bucky emerge from their tent, things start going south. They don’t even have time to be awkward or stop sleeping next to one another, too worn out at the end of the day to do anything except collapse where they stand. D-Day has the Nazis scurrying like rats, but HYDRA only seems to gain focus, distancing themselves more and more from the original party—not in ideology, but in who should lead them. Not a day goes by that Steve doesn’t regret not pushing Schmidt into the flames at Azzano instead of just punching him, like an idiot.

And then they start coming upon the concentration camps.

They’ve already personally been through imprisonment and human experimentation, but this is so much worse than what was done to them. Even the rumors of the camps can’t be said to accurately describe the absolute horror that greets them at the barbed wire gates.

After the first one, Bucky goes so deep into one of his episodes he doesn’t emerge for days; Monty bends right over and throws up, his retching carrying through the silent camp. Morita’s eyes are so wide you can see the whites all around his irises. But Dernier… Dernier is the worst off.

The small, affable man loses all color and seemingly all sense. He stumbles around like a child, hands shaking. Words can’t seem to get through to him, neither in French nor in English, not even when Gabe tries. Steve has to half-carry him from the camp.

It’s only after the third concentration camp that they learn why it hits him so hard.

There’d been survivors this time, starved, scraggly people whose eyes were alight with pain. When they’d seen the Commandos rushing in, the stronger ones had attacked the Nazis, too, an unholy rage guiding them in their desperation to be free of this hell. They’d had to go through the buildings one by one to ensure no one was left behind. The mass graves, the gas chambers, the dormitories unfit for even rats… How can anyone think that that’s the right thing to do to someone, like they aren’t even people?

Once the survivors have been sent on their way, some choosing to run into the wilderness and take their chances there, others being carted off by the military escorts that arrived just after the fight was over, the Howlies settle in for the night.

Bucky’s not quite out of his spell, the cold shadows still lurking just behind his eyes, but he’s more himself than he has been since entering that first camp. Steve’s by his side, leaning into him, needing the comfort of home to keep him from running off to tear through every single fucking camp that’s ever existed. They’re a bit low on rations, not critically so, but beans are starting to get really tasteless—and it’s not like they’re that tasty to begin with.

Dernier has settled at the edge of their small gathering, staring into the fire, bowl clutched in his hands. Not even Dum Dum has to words to ease this tension, so everything’s uncommonly quiet when Dernier starts talking. He speaks slowly and calmly, each word carefully formed; they’ve all picked up enough French to stumble through a conversation at this point, and the words they don’t understand usually don’t matter too much and context will provide enough clues. This, however, every syllable of this is important.

“ _I am Jewish_ ,” Dernier starts, not looking at any of them.

The confession sends a ripple through the Commandos; everyone stops eating. Even Gabe’s brows fly up; he hadn’t known either. Dernier’s shoulders are hunched, like a dog waiting for a kick.

“ _The French didn’t care when the Nazis first started hurting my people. They’ve never cared much for us to begin with. But when the Nazis turned their gaze on the world, suddenly it started to matter. My country didn’t care that my people were dying; as long as the Nazis didn’t try to wrest power from them, it didn’t matter. When they first started taking people from my neighborhood, I knew I had to run, I knew I had to do something. I ran to the Resistance, but I had to stay hidden still; even there, there are people who couldn’t care less, for whom the only thing that matters is that France isn’t under foreign rule.”_ He breathes out shakily _. “I didn’t tell you, because… not because I didn’t trust you, but because I’d grown so used to keeping it secret that it didn’t even occur to me. You were foreign soldiers—what did I know of your fight? For all I knew, you could’ve been as indifferent to the suffering of my people as the governments you’re fighting for. I’m not sorry, but I_ am _sorry, too._ ”

Gabe puts his hand on Dernier’s shoulder, the smaller man flinching at the touch. Anger burns in Steve, anger that Dernier had felt the slightest bit unsafe with them, anger at himself for not having said anything to condemn the camps before they ever saw them, anger that the world has shown so little care for Dernier and his people.

“It’s why we fight,” he tries now, knowing it’s weak even before the words form.

Dernier has enough guts to throw him a slightly venomous look. “ _It’s why_ you _fight. It’s why_ we _fight. But it’s not why the world fights. America didn’t care before they themselves were targeted.  Don’t mistake injured pride for compassion, my friend. Your government merely feared being overthrown by a greater power, just like mine, just like England, just like every Ally in this. None of our leaders are without hate in their hearts. The mightiest on our side are steeped in the violence of their superiority, but they don’t want to be ashamed of it._ ” He smiles, not unkindly. “ _Have you yourself not suffered too many indignities to believe in their goodness? They are but false gods, they couldn’t care if the world burned as long as they couldn’t feel the fire themselves. And yet, you still have faith that good will win out. For that, I both envy and pity you._ ”

The dressing down stings, but the truth of it echoes. Raised by a working mother who might have been born in New York, but whose parents and accent were a mark against her in the eyes of the state; Isaiah Bradley, whose noble nature was was disregarded just because of his skin; Erskine’s dream to cure the ills of the world, only half-free and only helped because his work was useful to the military. The powers that be have never shown an ounce of genuine care for them.

Before Steve can apologize, Morita speaks.

“When I left California, they were starting to put my people into camps,” he says, meeting everybody’s eyes almost defiantly. “Before that, we were jokes, targeted for violence and bigotry, but after Pearl Harbor we were considered dangerous, spies for Japan. I was drafted before anything could happen to me, but even then, I could only be assigned to a special unit—as if I couldn’t serve just as ably as any white soldier. I don’t even know what I’ll be going home to; the house where I grew up, or a detention center.”

“I was assigned like that, too,” Gabe adds slowly, as if unsure whether they’ll let him speak. “My old unit, the 92nd, our motto was ‘all black, all proud’. America’s never been kind to us; we were slaves, lesser, disenfranchised. Even now, there are neighborhoods we can’t visit, establishments we can’t enter. My brothers are killed for even glancin’ at a white woman, my sisters suffer tenfold. I’m fighting a war for a country who couldn’t care less if I died, as long as I die _for_ them.”

One by one, they all add their experiences, Dugan, Steve, and Bucky, too, all of them having Irish blood. They may have been white, and thus a few steps above the colored folks, but they were the least of the whites in America, thought to be beggars and thieves and leeches. Sarah Rogers, nearly on par with any saint there ever was, she, too, was still looked down on.

Monty largely stays quiet, listening intently but not adding anything. He grew up wealthy, his father having made his fortune in trade, and admits that there’s a high likelihood that the house he grew up in was built by slaveowners. “It’s not something that’s talked about,” he tells them, “It’s not even something that matters. We’re an empire; no empire was built on benevolence, even if we tell ourselves that. Our sins are many, but our guilt is void. Hell, our prime minister thinks the natives in our African colonies are vermin—he’d be perfectly happy to throw them in with the Jews if only Hitler hadn’t tried to seize world dominance.”

It’s becoming clear to Steve that the war won’t end with German defeat. What does victory matter, if the victors are no better than the losers? Do they even deserve to call themselves good, when the countries they’re fighting for are as brutal as the one they’re fighting against?

But Steve has faith; he won’t stop fighting, doubts any of the Commandos will either. The tiny toehold their popularity has given them has to be good for something, this body of his has to be good for something. It won’t be back alley brawls or parking lot snits; it’ll be words and riots. There has got to be something better than this—does not Captain America represent the good of America? How can Steve wear the cowl and carry the shield, if he does not earn it?

And maybe, he can start with this. With listening, with recognizing that he is not fighting alone.

*****

It’s been something close to a month of raids and rescues, and Steve’s almost grown used to the smell of death, to the sight of hundreds of bodies in mass graves. It’s the serum forcing his mind to ignore the horror again, making him take it in a stride rather than another, more natural way. It helps that Bucky seems as focused as him, as if the war doesn’t quite reach him anymore. They’ve all grown too used to the brutality of it all.

They’re heading north, back to England, when they stumble on the massacre in the woods. Gabe, walking up ahead, whistles a short, sharp tune to warn them. First, they come upon a few broken pajama-clad bodies, thin and dirty, their eyes wide with fear even in death. Few turn to several, several to many. A whole group of escaped Jews, all dead.

Steve sends Dugan and Monty out to look for survivors while he and the others keep watch. The dead bear the marks of torture. Several have been gunned down from behind, others carrying red smiles on their necks. No one has much hope they’ll find any alive; they’ve all been slaughtered like—

“Captain!”

Steve’s jerks his head up, already twisting towards the call.

Monty comes rushing back through the undergrowth, color high in his cheeks and eyes wide with surprise. “You need to come and see this, Captain,” he says, running back almost before he’s said his piece, Steve and the Commandos on his heels.

Dugan is kneeling by a downed tree, peering into the hollowed trunk. He’s speaking slowly and softly, murmuring assurances to whatever— _who_ ever—is curled up in there. At their approach, he turns his head, holds a hand up to stop them. “Just Gabe and you, Captain,” he says, getting to his feet carefully and stepping away.

Steve and Gabe approach cautiously, squatting down to blink into the gloom. What they see almost has Steve falling over backwards onto the ground.

A small, blood-speckled child stares out at them, eyes numb in the way those accustomed to pain and deprivation are. It’s difficult to tell whether it’s a boy or a girl, what with the child’s youth and the hair shorn so short until only brownish stubble remains along the scalp. Upon seeing the two of them, the child scooches backwards, teeth bared.

“Gabe, can you translate? We mean no harm,” Steve asks. Gabe repeats it, first in French, then in German and gets a small reaction, just a flicker of uncertainty in those big, brown eyes. “We’re here to help.”

The child doesn’t trust them.

It takes all day and half the night just to get it to take some water, almost making itself sick by drinking too fast. After that, it gets a little easier; the kid crawls out from the tree trunk, latches onto Steve’s leg like a living barnacle, and refuses to move. She—they finally find out—pitches a fit when he has to leave for a piss, screeching like a monkey the second he leaves her sight, fighting the Commandos tooth and nail to get back to him. Despite growing up with Bucky’s sisters, Steve never had much to do with them before they started walking and talking on their own, so his experience is largely limited to having had babies shoved at him during the USO tour. Not exactly childminder material, but they have to make do just to get a little cooperation from her.

She won’t take food unless Steve’s handed it to her and doesn’t sleep unless it’s right by his side—if Bucky’s there, she doesn’t sleep unless Steve keeps watch. She’s got an unnerving sort of stare, too attentive by far in the way she keeps swiveling her head around to keep them all in her sights. They end up calling her Maddie, for ease, since she doesn’t speak, not even to tell them her name. Morita estimates her to be nine years old or so, based on what little he knows of kids and his medical training. She can’t have been in the camp for long, isn’t quite as starved as most of the other kids they’ve seen.

Out of options, they bring her with them, deciding to hand her over to someone more suitable when they get to the SSR camp in Normandy. There, she’ll be fed properly, have a wash, and be given clothes that aren’t a dirty, striped uniform coupled with whatever shirts and socks the Commandoes push at her, all terrified she’ll freeze to death on the road. They can’t bring her all around Europe with them; frankly, none of them want to, despite the quick attachment she’s shown for Steve. The frontlines are no place for a child.

They never find out what happened in the forest.


	23. 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> an enemy in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have been reliably informed that i should be very sorry indeed for putting anyone through this chapter. 
> 
> WARNINGS: violence against children.

They’re a few days out from the pick-up point and have started encountering a few, small Allied squadrons as they pass through, though these are few and far between. It’s been an uneventful march, thank God; their only enemy has been the bad weather, which in itself is nothing to scoff at. Maddie’s been all bundled up in their extra shirts and socks, her small legs almost completely covered by the socks alone, and they’ve started taking turns carrying her. That way, she at least has some shared body heat to protect her, too.

Dernier in particular has tried to make things as routine and familiar for her as possible, sitting with her every night, saying prayers in Hebrew on the Sabbath. Much to his distress, she seems only to grow fearful at that, as if even reciting the _shema_ unsettles her to her core. They discuss it where she can’t hear, all a little shook up by her reaction. What kind of torture can make a child fear their own culture, the very things that are supposed to shelter them? It doesn’t bear thinking.

It’s been over half a day since they last encountered anyone on their journey, and they’ve bedded down for the night in a small clearing. It’s been nearly a week of travelling with Maddie, and that short time alone has made the approaching winter that much more evident in the air. If they hadn’t found her when they did, she might not have lived.

Frost has made the ground hard and cold, and their breaths fog the air in front of them. Steve lies in the twilight between sleeping and waking in his and Bucky’s tent, blinking slowly up at the canvas. The serum has made his body run hot, so the cold doesn’t really bother him that much; Bucky, however, isn’t too fond of the low temperatures, and has curled himself along Steve’s side in his sleep, his breaths tickling Steve’s neck. Despite her unease, Maddie allows the encroachment on her ‘territory’—meaning that she doesn’t mind Steve’s space being invaded in this one instance, because at least it’ll allow her to gain some extra warmth, given that she sleeps on his chest, curled into a ball.

She’s awake, too; she’s too still to be anything else. Slowly, she uncurls her body, stretching each limb out like a spider, wary and quiet, as if the slightest sound will bring untold horrors down on them. In the dark of the night, Steve’s eyes are still better than most, so her wary gaze is plain to see. Glancing furtively around, she finally pokes Steve in the chest, scuttling towards the opening of the tent, legs crossed.

Familiar with the girl’s non-verbal signs, Steve untangles himself from his blankets and Bucky, taking her by the hand and leading her a little way off into the bushes to do her business. Dum Dum has the watch, and he tips his hat at them as they leave. But rather than being satisfied with the accommodations—something that isn’t usually an issue—Maddie wrinkles her nose at every bush and drags Steve farther from the camp, almost dancing with the need to pee.

“Maddie, please, no one can see you from here,” he tries, but she just frowns and keeps pulling at him.

When they’re far enough from camp that even Steve can’t see their tents anymore, he puts his foot down, refusing to go further. It’s not that he’s afraid they’ll be attacked; this close to the SSR base, there’s not been a single enemy spotted in the last two months, or so the radio messages say. It’s just wise to be a little wary still, to keep close to his men. Being cautious keeps you alive; his Colt is hastily slung across his waist, just in case.

They have a silent stand-off that irritates Maddie, her eyes flashing with petulance. Steve doesn’t budge, just raises his brow and nods towards the shrubbery. Seeming to curb the urge to bare her teeth at him, Maddie scrambles into the bushes quickly. Steve turns to keep watch and to give her privacy.

It’s a calm night. Not even the rustle of nocturnal animals disturbs them, barely any wind. Steve’s dressed down a little, out of his uniform for sleep. It’s damn good in a fight, but a bother to sleep in, so he only does so if they’re in enemy territory and need to be constantly on guard. It’s chilly enough that the long-sleeved shirt and long-johns are a bit too light for the weather, making his body work overtime.

He breathes in, breathes out slow. Listens. It’s quiet.

Too quiet.

He slowly becomes aware that every instinct in him is gearing up for a fight, making the small hairs on his arms stand on end. His eyes dart around, trying to fix on the source of his unease, but there’s nothing out there. But still the tension remains, prickling at his neck.

“Maddie, get behind me,” he orders under his breath, body tensing in readiness. She won’t understand the words, but the tone should do it. She’s a clever girl.

Maddie pads up to him silently, little feet barely making a sound. He doesn’t glance back to ensure it’s her, knows the cadence of her step by now. Her sounds do not register as threatening.

He is saved solely by the bodily instinct screaming at him to move; even then, it’s nearly too late. The knife embeds itself in his side rather than between his ribs, making him hiss out harshly at the pain. He staggers forward, twisting towards his assailant. There’s only Maddie, her face still.

“Maddie, get behind—”

She moves like water, slipping around him with the eerie grace of a cat. Her small hands grip the knife and pulls, slices it outwards to create the most damage. Astonishment seeps through Steve, has him flinching away like a kid rather than a trained soldier; he stumbles over his feet, scrambles upwards, one hand clutching his wounded side, the other held outwards to ward Maddie off. The knife is familiar; it’s one of Bucky’s.

“Maddie—”

She stabs at him, nearly taking a finger. She’s so small and so fast, and Steve doesn’t want to hurt her. His cut _burns_. She takes advantage of his reluctance, evading his grasp and getting in close. It shouldn’t be difficult to subdue a kid, but Steve’s hands are too clumsy, his heart too soft to do any damage. His soothing pleas fall on uncaring ears.  

Whoever she is, she’s been trained for this. Her body might be that of a child, but her instinct is that of a killer. The uneven ground and darkness don’t seem to bother her at all; she even uses it against him, herding him towards tangled roots and ducking behind trees, emerging in shadow to come at him from another angle.

In the back of his mind, Steve registers the approaching footsteps of the Commandos. He tries turning towards them so that Maddie will be between him and them, hoping to be able to disarm her and—and what? What the fuck do you do with a child assassin?

But Maddie’s noticed them, too. She flies at him with more ferocity than before, taking her chances and even scuttling up Steve’s body to his neck like a spider. The knife glints in the pale moonlight; the first jab glances along his cheek, tracing a line of fiery pain that nearly reaches to his eye; the second one he’s able to derail, bending Maddie’s small, thin arm back like a branch. She gasps in pain; he’s too soft not to let go at once. A mistake.

The knife rises up, aimed for his throat—

Whatever instinct the serum instilled in him, it’s probably what saves his skin. While his brain is screaming at him not to hurt Maddie, his body reacts on its own, his hand grasping her by the collar and hurtling her away from him. She hits the ground hard, tumbling head of heels before scrambling to her feet.

“Steve—”

The Commandos have arrived, fanned out, Bucky at the left, jaw slack with surprise.

Maddie glances back, eyes darting between Steve and Bucky. She’s landed quite close to him, closer than to any of the others. The knife is still in her hand, clutched like it’s her only lifeline. The wise thing would be to run; realistically, there’s no way this could end well. Instead, she locks eyes with Steve, just a fraction of a second, before launching herself towards the tree next to Bucky. She scuttles up the trunk like a squirrel, sets her feet and jumps outwards.

She’s too fast for any of the Commandos to react, but to Steve the seconds last a lifetime. Her small body sails through the air as if through mud, every twist and turn as graceful as a dancer’s. He faintly registers the way her oversized clothes swirl around her, the tight way she folds herself to propel through the air faster. Bucky’s turned his head towards her, eyes widening. She’ll hit his chest and attach herself by her fingernails, cut his throat before anyone can move. He’ll die—

Fear speeds through Steve faster than ever before. The Colt is in his hand, aim steady. He takes the shot; the kickback barely registers.

The bullet sends Maddie to the ground, her trajectory derailed.

At once, horror bubbles to the surface, sending Steve to his knees. He can’t breathe; he shot her, he shot Maddie, he shot _a child_. His lungs close up, his asthma’s returning; even his heart beats unevenly.

Maddie gets to her feet. She’s clutching her shoulder, blood slowly dripping between her fingers. Little whines make their way into her choked breaths, animal sounds of pain. There’s fear in her eyes, but not betrayal, not surprise. Just acceptance.

She takes one last look at Steve, spits an unfamiliar word, then disappears into the dark.

Steve crumbles, falling forwards onto his hands. Vaguely, he registers the sounds of heaving sobs, knows that they’re coming from himself and yet not quite aware of it, as if he’s not really in his body. He feels filthy, like the blood of every dead man is stained on his hands, caked under his nails. His throat is raw with the taste of iron.

Bucky slides to his knees next to him, rifle thrown down carelessly. His hands cart through Steve’s hair, shakes him, forces him to turn his face to Bucky’s. He’s calling out orders, sending Gabe and Dum Dum after Maddie, saying Steve’s name. 

“We tell no one,” he’s saying, teeth bared. “ _No one_. Steve? Steve, listen to me, Stevie, please. You’ll be okay. Just breathe with me. Please, Steve, _breathe_.”

But he can’t.

*

It’s hours later that Steve returns to some semblance of himself. He’s useless until then, shaking and crying and pleading for nothing and everything. He wants it to be a nightmare, wants to go home, wants to be in his smaller body, wants to be asleep in his and Bucky’s apartment in Brooklyn and wake up on the edge of an asthma attack, wants to have Bucky sit at his back and talk him down and breathe with him.

He thinks he might have called for his ma. He slides in and out of reality, thinking that he’s in some alley in New York, Bucky at his back, then back in France, Bucky in front of him. He’s killed over a hundred men in this war. At one point, he asks if Bucky remembers the faces of all those he’s taken out, too. “I don’t keep count,” he’s told, but the tone says _every single one._ Steve nearly killed a child—he might as well have. She won’t survive the winter out here, not in her too-thin clothes.

God, why’d she tried to attack him? Had it been her plan all along? Who was she? Dum Dum says she might not have been Jewish, says her last—and only—word to them was in Russian, though not one he recognized. Dernier says it might be why she reacted to the Hebrew the way she did, as if it was unfamiliarity that had driven her then. They don’t find her, so they can’t ask her.

It doesn’t matter.

Through it all, Bucky somehow remains himself. Every time Steve is aware enough to register his surroundings, he sees the shadow of whatever it is Bucky becomes in his dark spells, the focus and coldness of the perfect soldier. But that man never fully surfaces, as if Bucky’s beaten him back by sheer desperation to be by Steve’s side through it all. It creates a strange combination of the two, the efficiency of one and the compassion of the other. And for the first time, a new, whole Bucky emerges, someone who can balance the violence of war and the kindness of home at the same time. Someone who’ll come out of this war worn, but not broken.

Steve clings to him and weeps. Morita might have sewn up his wounded, but he can’t remember.

At dawn, his eyes are red and itchy. His voice barely comes above a hoarse croak, all cried out during the night. The Commandos have settled around he and Bucky like guard dogs, shoulders pressed together, faces turned away for privacy.

When he finally gets to his feet, stiff as Hell all over, they treat him the same. There’s less easy laughter, less comfortable silence, but it’s as close to their everyday ease as they can get. They, too, are shook by the night; Steve feels like a failure for not being there for them, for submitting to his own internal uproar so easily. Maddie’s disappearance has left grooves in their faces, especially in the places that’d been marked by laugh lines before. But every attempt to apologize is brushed off, almost angrily in some cases. Jim even cusses him out for not taking care of himself.

All day, they take turns walking beside him, clapping his shoulder whenever they switch places. Bucky never wavers from his side, never steps too far from him. A few times, their arms knock together. It’s enough.

The support of his squad and his quirky biology erases the stress of the night, and by the time they reach the SSR camp, no one would look at him and guess what happened. Already, the memory has wrapped itself in layers and layers of barbed wire in his mind, a hidden cache just like every other memory he has of death and war. He wants to go home. He wants to go back to Bucky’s last day in Brooklyn and shake himself for his naivety.

He trudges on, his friends at his heels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there'll prob be another chapter and maybe an interlude with 'original' material after this, then we get back to our regularly scheduled First Avenger movie shenanigans. we're waiting for a train...


	24. 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The state of the war. Bucky and Steve have a moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first of all: THIS IS A DOUBLE UPDATE, CHAPTER 25 HAS ALSO BEEN UPLOADED. no reason for this other than my beta-reader dared me (sorta. kinda. not really. she was like 'okay, this is nice' and i was like 'are u daring me to write the next chapter' and here we are).  
> This chapter is a wee bit like a long interlude, summarising and acting as a bit of a filler. Next chapter, shit gets real.

“So, what we’ve got,” says Colonel Phillips in a distinctly unimpressed tone, “is mediocre news, bad news, and worse news.”

They’re gathered in one of the smaller command offices at the SSR headquarters in London, Steve, his team, the colonel, Peggy, Stark, and a number of other SSR agents—spies, Steve thinks, no one he is particularly familiar with. When he’d walked in, Peggy’d raised her brows at him a little but not otherwise acknowledged Steve’s presence. Safe to say he is _still_ in her bad graces, despite having largely forgotten all about it himself. He’s been… well. He’s been busy, hasn’t he? The war, the fighting, that morning in the tent—everything. Then Maddie; Christ, Maddie. Despite it all, Steve worries for her. Who could take a child like that and make her into a weapon?

  “The mediocre news,” Colonel Phillips continues, “is that the Krauts are panicking. We’re getting reports of more and more internal strife. _But_ , that’s only true for Hitler’s men. HYDRA are still going strong—which leads us to the bad news. Agent Carter, if you would.”

Peggy opens a folder and starts laying out photographs, many of them grainy. A small, plump man with spectacles is depicted in each. He’s instantly recognizable. At Steve’s side, Bucky tenses. “This is Dr. Arnim Zola, Johann Schmidt’s personal physician. He was brought in from his native Switzerland after Schmidt had been injected with the serum. Reports state that he has found a way to stabilize the serum in Schmidt’s body—he’s lived in chronic pain since the original serum injections, thus the… cosmetic changes you observed in Italy. Zola first created a daily mix of sedatives and painkillers that allowed Schmidt to go about his routine, but now he’s succeeded in curing him of the pain entirely, after several failed experiments.”

Bucky shuffles uneasily. The Commandos carefully do not look at him.

“And now the worse news,” Phillips says.

One of the unfamiliar agents speak up. He has a soft, unfamiliar accent. “It’s been previously reported that Schmidt stumbled on an artifact almost a year and a half ago. We don’t know for sure what it is, and no one’s been able to investigate it. All we know for sure is that they’re calling it ‘the cube’. But whatever it is, whatever it does, our agents say that he’s found a way to use it—Dr. Zola helped create a mechanism that ‘stabilized’ the artifact, and, well…” the agent hesitates, winces a little. “Here’s where it gets… strange.”

“Continue, Agent,” Phillips bids.

“Yes, sir. Our reports say that they intend to use it to invite an entity into our world.”

Steve’s brows shoot up. He glances around at the others; the Commandos are all frowning in confusion, waiting for someone to say ‘just kidding!’, but everybody else is stone-faced and grim. “An ‘entity’?”

“The roots of HYDRA are old,” Stark butts in. “Way older than the Nazi ideology. Their goals have always been very out there. Completely loopy, if you ask me.” At Steve’s confusion, he continues patronizingly: “They believe in magic, Rogers. Old gods and the like, quite taken with the Teutonic and Norse ones, I hear, despite their Greek origins. Such a being’s likely the entity they want to court.”

“No matter their delusions, their actions still make them a threat,” Colonel Phillips states.

“To open the way to this entity, they plan to create a significant disturbance, not just via the war, but by chemically, _physically_ altering the world,” the Agent adds. “All our sources indicate that Schmidt believes the cube to not only have these ‘mystical’ powers, but that it also—factually—functions as a stabilizing agent.”

“What for?” Monty asks.

Rather than answering, the Agent slides a new photograph towards them, face grim. The Commandos all shuffle forward to get a peek. Steve’s heart drops to the bottom of his stomach. “They’ve got bombs.” _Big_ fucking bombs.

Stark’s mouth twists, clever eyes a bit too full of awe considering the situation. “I’m not even sure what’s in those. Could be your run-of-the-mill nuke, we’ve been working on those since ’42, but it could also be one of Schmidt’s concoctions, in which case: we’re fucked.” He says it all with a shrug, as if playing around with weapons of mass-destruction is an everyday occurrence and not really a cause for panic.

Dum Dum pipes up, “So we’ve got a concentrated effort to end the world from what’s left of HYDRA, a genocidal megalomaniac who can now go about his business with nothing to hold him back, _and_ the means to actually carry out this fucking nightmare as we speak.” He laughs, a little meanly. “Are there no good news?”

Everybody shrugs. One of the unfamiliar agents mentions an odd intercepted message from an unknown Russian splinter-group to HYDRA—they hadn’t quite been able to crack the code in its entirety, and what they _had_ found seemed to be in code, still: it’d mentioned sending an agent to dispose of Captain America. “All we could get from it was that they’d be sending a widow,” the agent says, “and that she’d be small, as to avoid suspicion. Met any widows on your way?”

The Commandos, all of whom have tensed at the mention of a Russian agent, are silent as the grave. Steve, being right next to them all, hears Dernier’s stuttered breath, the rattle of sorrow in his throat. _Maddie_ , it has to be Maddie. But why call her a widow? God, please don’t let her have been a child-bride as well as a child-soldier, how much pain must she endure? Maybe death in the wild would be better for her, in the end.

“No widows,” Bucky half-lies, voice steady, almost nonchalant. “We’ll be sure to keep an eye out when we go back out.”

They break shortly thereafter. For the moment, the Commandos are all grounded, officially on leave for an unspecified amount of time. It’s possibly to make up for the months and months of non-stop missions, and the despair inspired by the tornado of bad news make them all accept it gracefully. Had they just the smallest inkling where Schmidt might be holed up, Steve knows they’d all be shipping out immediately, orders or no.

Peggy marches away the second they’re excused, so Steve tells the others to go on without him, already half-turned to catch up with her. Bucky glances over his shoulder, spots her retreating form, and waves Steve on. There’s something shuttered in his eyes, but his easy smile seems carefree; it shouldn’t hurt Steve, but it does, and he curses himself for it. _Why did you think he would be jealous now?_ As if their kisses had meant anything.

“Agent Carter! Please, a moment of your time,” Steve calls, gaining on her easily.

Peggy spins around; her hair is all pinned up like it’d been on that day back at basecamp, back when Steve’d tipped over the pole and gotten the flag. She looks a little worn, eyes a little heavy from long months in the field, but her make-up is as perfect as ever. It’s a little terrifying, to be honest, the level of competency.

“Yes, Captain Rogers?”

Steve shuffles, resists looking away from her direct gaze. He takes a deep breath, tries not to sound like he’s rehearsed this. “I want to apologize for my behavior the last time we spoke. I was out of line, I offended you, and I was wrong. Please, forgive me.”

Peggy hums, tilting her head like a bird. “I saw Senator Brandt’s newest Captain America reel, you know.” _She’s mad, why is she mad?_ “It’s not exactly pertinent for a secret agent to have their face shown in a propaganda film.”

“What? Oh! I swear, that wasn’t my idea, I’m so sorry, Stark put them up to it, he put the picture in the compass, I didn’t know—”

“ _Stark_ orchestrated that?”

Steve nods, swears up and down that he had nothing to do with it. He should’ve thought of that, should’ve figured that Peggy’s picture getting used in the movie would mean more than just implying any intimacy between them, but _fuck_ , this’d never even occurred to him. And he’s had the damn compass on him for months, has glimpsed her picture every time he used it in the field, and hasn’t that been slightly awkward.     

Some of the tension goes out of Peggy, her shoulders slumping. “I will _end_ him.” She sighs. “I accept your apology, Steve. And I suppose that I also… that I overreacted slightly.”

“It’s alright, I understand.”

“It’s not alright, but it’s done. Just, answer me this—actually, no, don’t, it doesn’t matter.”

“Peggy, you can ask me anything,” Steve says, dancing around her to keep her eyes on him as she turns away.

“No, it’s my pride speaking, nothing more.” When Steve doesn’t let up, staring at her like a puppy, she relents, not without rolling her eyes a little. “I know it’s the middle of the war, and nothing is certain, and I shouldn’t even ask—we’re both so busy, and the future is still up in the air, and I know, we can’t exactly promise each other much of anything, and—”

“Peggy, you’re rambling.”

“Thank you, Steve, I know that,” she snaps, then softens. He’s never seen her blush before; it’s quite becoming. In this moment, she’s braver than he’s ever been. “I just want to know: am I wasting my time waiting for you to ask me to dance?”

Steve flushes, looks away, stutters shallow denials. He doesn’t know what to say; he’d love to dance with her, but… But nothing. The only thing holding him back is a daydream, but he can’t tell her that. Can’t tell anyone.

“Is there something else, then?” she asks, softly, like she’s expecting to be let down.

He thinks of Bucky. “No,” he lies, straightens up. _You can do this_. _You don’t deserve it, but you can do this_. _You nearly died_. “In fact, I—would you like to meet me at the pub? We’re—the Commandos and I, I mean—will be heading there tonight, same one as, as last time. I promise I won’t step on your toes,” he says with a nervous chuckle.

Her smile warms his entire body, but her words douse that warmth quickly. “I would love to, Steve, but I can’t tonight. I’m afraid I’ve been recalled to the field. Another time?”

“Another time,” he agrees, smiling awkwardly.

*

It’s a few days after Christmas, and the Commandos are still on leave. It’s been a long month.

The only HYDRA bases left are the ones they haven’t been able to map out, and intelligence says that there might be just one enormous bunker left, but hell if anyone knows where to find it. Steve and his team are too valuable to risk without proper cause, so they’ve been effectively relegated as the SSR Headquarter mascots for their shore leave.

Safe to say, more than a few officers can’t wait to see them go.

After the year they’ve had, idle Howlies make for anxious Howlies, and anxious Howlies make for impulsivity to keep the memories at bay. Gabe and Monty will swear up and down that they’d been asleep in their bunks when two men of their descriptions had been spotted dancing with all the, ahem, working girls out in Paddington. Steve knows _for a fact_ that they were out dancing—both had been covered in sweat and soused as hell when they came stumbling in way after curfew. After much wheedling from the others, they’d admitted to having been dared by the girls to dance with _each other_ , and only later shown the girls their moves.

Steve doesn’t reprimand them for it. They all need a little happiness, and as long as no one’s getting hurt, he doesn’t plan on getting involved. What happened in the forest hangs above them in their quieter moments, despite no one actually talking about it. It’s easy to see; Dum Dum’ll sometimes turn around like he expects Maddie to stand right behind him, wanting to get at the cooking pot first thing; Dernier pauses between prayers, as if still hoping they’ll be said back to him in a high, girlish voice. Despite her attachment to Steve—despite her _mission_ —they’d all quickly made room for her, eager to protect something innocent. What fools they’d been. That poor girl.

Of them all, Bucky seems the best off. Rather than breaking him, the forest has given him new vigor and a dangerous glint in his eye. He spends a lot of time harassing Stark, a complete revisal from how he’d been the last time he met the man.

It’s distinctly uncomfortable being in the same room as the two of them, the tension almost a living thing. Stark has never backed down a day in his life, and despite the predator staring at him from behind Bucky’s eyes, he baits it. The two snipe at one another constantly, like siblings almost. Bucky slips in an out of his ‘other’ side with ease, almost to the point where Steve can’t quite tell them apart anymore. They’re both just Bucky, and Bucky’s just his best friend.

Bucky takes plenty of advantage of this, using his cold ferocity to keep Stark at bay when the other gets too clever with his words, snapping at him like a wolf. It fascinates Stark, makes him want to needle Bucky—he has never met a weapon he didn’t adore and having had no hand in creating it only makes him more interested. It’s not to say that he ignores Steve now, not completely, despite Bucky’s best intentions; Stark still talks to Steve like he’s a particularly clever dog or something of equal intelligence, but a dog that’s welcome in his space, nonetheless. It sort of bothers Steve, but not enough to make him do anything about it. Bucky takes that as his cue to be the buffer, and boy, does he work hard.

It definitely doesn’t hurt that their sniping allows for Bucky to poke around Stark’s lab, just the way he’s always wanted to.

London looks as pretty as when Steve first came here, despite the bombed-out buildings and rubble. There’s snow in the streets, everybody’s bundled up and trudging on, walking between buildings older than the USA. For the past few days, Steve’s been getting increasingly restless, longing for home and the comforts of a simpler life.

It’s strange, but their lives back home seem almost gentler in retrospect, their troubles less dire. He’s forgotten the long nights of being laid up in bed, half out of his mind with fever, a priest saying his last rites at his side. The words that once came so easy to him in church are fading with disuse, despite the many, _many,_ times Steve was made to say them as a teen; all the Hail Marys in the world couldn’t make up for the anger and desire little Stevie Rogers had felt every second of every day.

He _did_ go to Mass on Christmas Eve, gladly accepting Dum Dum’s offer to join him. Bucky had followed at their heels, but he’d been just as clumsy as Steve during the sermon. The other Howlies held to their own traditions.

He’s passing by a bar somewhere south of Trafalgar Square when Bucky catches up with him, face flushed with cold and happiness. The break from fighting has been good to him, has allowed him to go out dancing (he always, _always_ comes back without puffy lips or lipstick marks, easing something vain and petty in Steve), kicking back and just enjoying being alive.

“Carter still not back?” he asks, hand stuffed in his pockets. Despite the officer’s cap, his hair’s curling wildly, too long for regulations by now. Steve adores it beyond measure.

“Only to report, then she went home for Christmas, I think. Something about her family, didn’t have time to ask.”

Bucky nods. He’s in his dress greens despite his blue jacket being way more suited for the cold weather, matching Steve perfectly as they stroll through the nearly empty streets. The cold and curfew are starting to drive people inside, leaving the world almost still.

However, one dancehall has the window cracked, allowing music to escape and gently stir the air. To his surprise, they are melodies that Steve knows well, American big band music and the odd ballad thrown in for the lovers in the crowd.

“You ain’t been out dancin’ with us, Stevie,” Bucky remarks softly, swaying slightly with the music as if he can’t help himself. He never could back home, always seemed to come alive the second the first notes sounded. The times he’s shadow-danced around their tiny apartment are countless. “Thought for sure you’d take at least one last chance to brush up before Carter comes a-callin’.”

Steve shrugs. “Don’t think brushing up will help much. And I’m maybe, sorta hoping she won’t be too averse to leading.”

The song changes, another slow melody. He can’t quite pinpoint it, but Steve’s pretty sure he knows it. It’s slightly—more than slightly, even—reminiscent of the songs from _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,_ which he’d dragged Bucky to see several times, captivated by the art styles and heart of it. In his wildest dreams, that sort of artistry was that kind that Steve wanted to do, but he’d never looked into it proper. Just drawing signs and painting regularly were hard enough when there was no money and he was getting sick again. Poverty don’t lend itself to reaching for the starts like that.

“I know this song,” Bucky says, head tilted as he listens. “Heard it a time or two before shipping out. Hey, Stevie, she’s singing about you!”

Steve scoffs, pushes at Bucky’s shoulder, much to the other’s amusement. So, yes, maybe some of the lyrics now seem somewhat apt for him. It’s a song about a soldier, an ordinary man doing the what must be done—it’s all embellished, with the singer proclaiming her love in a thoroughly pure and chaste manner, of course.

It’s not a long song; another minute and a half, and it’ll be over.

Seized by something like longing and homesick beyond all reckoning, Steve bumps his shoulder against Bucky’s herding him toward the shadowed area behind the hall. At Bucky’s inquisitive sound, all Steve says is: “I _can_ lead in a waltz.”

It’s easy then, prodding Bucky into position, placing one of his hand on Steve’s shoulder, taking the other in his own hand. It’s nothing they haven’t done before back home, so it’s not at all awkward or embarrassing. When Steve takes the first clumsy step, Bucky grins like it’s still Christmas Day and lets Steve lead him through it.

Slowly, Steve lets him take over, automatically allowing Bucky’s steps to guide them around rather than his own. He’s got no interest in leading when it comes to this; it’s enough to follow, always has been. They hum the song under their breaths, Bucky with somewhat more success than Steve—being deaf in one ear never really lent him much adequacy in hitting the notes, alright?

“ _He with those wings on his tunic_ ,” he sings softly, voice cracking over the high notes and making them both giggle like children, “ _and me with my heart on my sleeve_.”

They won’t be winning any prizes, but who cares. It’s perfect.   


	25. 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there's a train, it's winter, and it's a long way down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS PART OF THE 26 JUNE DOUBLE UPDATE

Ever wondered what the weather’s like in Austria in the deep of winter? Surprisingly, it’s not too bad when the sun is shining and you’re up in the mountains. You’ll even get a sunburn, as Steve’s discovered; his freckles are out full force. When it’s cloudy, though? And snowing? Fucking cold as shit.

Steve and the Howlies are on a forested mountainside, he and Bucky keeping watch as Monty and Dum Dum secure the zipline that’ll bring them from A to B. It’d been a scramble to get from Italy to Austria, mostly due to the fact that they’d not actually been expecting to get anything approaching accurate intel on the HYDRA higher-ups. It’d been a stroke of luck, really; they’d successfully caught a small HYDRA squadron unawares and been able to steal their big, boxy radio without breaking it. Barely a week later, they had a lead, and here they are.

Bucky leans forward cautiously, looking pale as he glances down, down, down into the valley deep below. “Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone in Coney Island?”

Steve snorts. “Yeah. I threw up.”

“Yup.” Bucky squints at him. “This isn’t payback is it?”

“Now why would I do that?”

They’re all cold, tired, and sore from sleeping on the ground for days. Jim and Gabe sit by the radio, attentively listening to even the faintest chatter; Dernier’s checking over his weapons, making sure they’re all good to go.

“We’re on the right track,” Gabe says suddenly, looking up from the radio. “Dr. Zola’s on the train, dispatcher just gave him permission to open up the throttle. Wherever he’s going, they must need him bad.”

“Monty, keep watch.”

“Yessir, Captain.”

There’s not much to do while waiting for the train, nothing but stamping their feet and keeping warm. Gabe and Dernier have started a childish game involving slapping at each other’s ungloved hands while Morita needles them from the sidelines. Dum Dum’s saying a prayer over his rosary.

Quietly informing Steve that he needs to take a leak real quick, Bucky slips off into the trees, not too far but still somewhat more private than they usually are about things like that. You can’t be in the army this long and not get used to things like nudity and taking a piss really fast. Hell, they’ve had to shit in the forest using leaves for paper, like cavepeople or something (did cavepeople even wipe? _Point is_ , no one cares about it as long as you can maintain some basic politeness).

When Bucky’s been gone for more than ten minutes, Steve starts getting antsy. It’s not like him to have attacks of modesty, and he’d just have said it if he needed a moment. They’ve gotten really good about respecting each other’s boundaries, it’s the last act of decency out here. No matter how much you enjoy each other’s company, how much you need to lean on your fellow men to stay sane, sometimes you just need to be alone for a minute or two.

But the middle of a mission isn’t exactly the best time for that sort of thing, so Steve starts after Bucky, following his tracks in the ankle-high snow.

The air smells crisp and clean and sharp up here, nothing like he’s ever smelled in Brooklyn, even on mornings where the snow’s covered everything and no one’d been outside yet. It’s like he never really noticed how dirty his city was until he left it, like even the polished hotels uptown had been stained with grime despite the best intentions of their proprietors. It stings in his nose a little, pleasant and painful at the same time.

Bucky looks a little lost when Steve finds him, eyes a little cloudy. It’s nothing like his little spells, not that those seem to be a thing anymore. No, this is a familiar sort of distance; back when they were in school, Bucky’d sometimes sit over his homework and get this look in his eye, like he was seeing it all play out without having to write it down first. He’d only ever come back down when he’d worked it through in his head, a self-satisfied smile replacing his thinking-face.

“You alright there, Buck?”

Rolling his shoulders, Bucky huffs a little. “Just taking in the scenery, Stevie. Always liked forests.”

“You ain’t never been in a forest in your goddamned life before you came here, jerk.”

“ _Punk_.” He pinches Steve through the uniform, hard enough to make him squawk in offense. They start walking back slowly. “Don’t really like heights.”

Steve knows. To be perfectly frank, he’s always been a little miffed that _he_ was the one to puke after the Cyclone. The rollercoaster might not have taken them that high, but it was still way above the level that Bucky preferred to be, but no, Steve was the one chucking his guts onto the grass after. He’d just had popcorn, too, and don’t think he’s not still mad that he wasted those.

“If the line breaks, I’m gonna be real pissed.”

“It’s not, Buck, it’s perfectly safe.”

“It better be, I don’t want my last impressions to be these.”

“‘Last impressions’? You tryin’ to be poetic or something?”

“ _Fuck off_. I mean like,” Bucky waves his hands, puffing up dramatically in his blue jacket. “I wanna smell my ma’s apple pie again, I wanna see my nephew up close, I don’t wanna be both freezing _and_ sweating in these clothes, and I sure as fuck don’t want the last thing I taste in this world to be Dernier’s shitty coffee just ‘cus a damn wire can’t handle half a ton of dumbass.”

They’re almost back with the others. “It’ll hold, just trust in it.”

“Brilliant advice, Stevie, you got any more?”   

Steve laughs, looks up at Bucky through his lashes. He’d cut his hair again before shipping out; it lies neatly along his head, even out here in the middle of nowhere, and he’s only a little bit stubbly this time of day. If they put him and Peggy on the recruitment posters, all America and Britain would join the army.

“If you’re so bothered, go chew on some snow to get the taste of coffee outta your mouth.”

Bucky makes a sour face, but then pauses. He darts his eyes towards the others, still a little ways away and not paying them any attention, solely focused on the mountain across the valley. A mischievous little smile starts at the corner of his mouth, dimpling his cheek sweetly, and he pulls Steve behind a tree, pushes him up against it.

“What—”

“You were sayin’ I should try and wash out the taste, yeah?” Bucky whispers, his face real close. Steve’s heart thumps sharply, knees a little weak. Not daring to breathe, he nods, manages a weak hum of acknowledgement. Bucky licks his lip, just a flash of tongue. “Let your taste be my last, then.”

He doesn’t start soft, this time. Instead, he pulls Steve’s head down and coaxes his mouth open, nips and licks until Steve’s helpless to do anything but submit. Bucky really does taste like coffee; it’s not all that pleasant, but it doesn’t matter. The taste fades quickly, until there’s just the slightly warm and watery taste of Bucky’s kiss, nothing but the best feeling in the entire world.

Steve’s pulling him closer by the collar, all but forgetting where they are, when Monty whistles sharply, jarring them from their little corner of heaven. They blink at each other, flushes and panting a little, then hurries back and try to act as composed as possible. Dum Dum eyes them, a bemused light in his eyes, but doesn’t comment.

“They’re moving like the devil, we need to get going,” Monty reports, lowering his binoculars and moving towards the zipline. The train’s coming around the bend of the mountain, speeding faster than anything Steve’s ever seen, even faster than the damn Cyclone.

“We’ve only got about a ten-second window. Miss it, and we’re bugs on a windshield,” Steve calls.

“Mind the gap!” Monty chirps.

“Better get movin’, bugs! _Wahoo_!” Dum Dum cheers.

“ _Maintenant_!” Dernier snaps. _Now_!

Steve jumps and the line carries him downward.

It’s a queasy-joyous sort of feeling, the weightlessness of it. It’s not quite like parachuting, which Steve doesn’t actually mind now that his body can handle it. It’s more like trying to take an extra step down the stairs only to find out you’re already on the ground.

He comes in above the train, unhooks his line and lands hard on the roof, stumbling a little. The others are right behind him. He and Bucky board a cabin together, the others dispersing in pairs. Silently, they make their way through the train, taking in the strange objects onboard.

When Steve passes through to the next cart, and the door snaps unexpectedly closed behind him. He throws himself against it; Bucky’s on the other side, eyes wide, teeth bared as he tries to work it open, too. 

They don’t have long before they’re discovered and are soon swarmed by HYDRA guards from both ends. The guards are carrying new, bigger guns; every shot is a doozy, powerful as hell, but the kickback is bad enough that they can’t fire them all that fast.

Steve throws himself into the fight. The shield takes the brunt of the shots, making them bounce off harmlessly, but still Steve needs to plant his feet firmly to stay standing. One of the shots go wild, takes out the door; Steve rushes his opponents and they’re gone in seconds.

He doesn’t stop to breathe before rushing in to help Bucky. They fall into formation easily, Steve ahead, Bucky at his six, rifle aimed and firing just above Steve’s shoulder. It’s exhilarating, this trust between them; an inch, and the bullet would lodge in Steve’s neck, but he never fears mis-stepping, not even once. He’s got Bucky on his lips and at his back, and there’s nothing he fears.

When Bucky’s bullets run out, both his rifle and his gun, Steve tosses him his own, and they make quick work of the last guard. Slightly breathless, they knock shoulders. “I had him on the ropes,” Bucky says. There’s a little blood on his lip.

“I know you did,” Steve grins. Just then, another soldier rushes in; Steve had missed one. “ _Get down!_ ”

He doesn’t brace properly, too busy trying to cover Bucky. The shot unbalances him and he falls, the bullet ricocheting off of the shield and hitting one of the cannisters on the shelves. Instead of harmlessly puncturing it, the cannister goes _boom_ , taking the outer side of the train compartment with it; the valley lurks below.

Bucky’s up faster than Steve; he jumps forward, grabbing the gun and the shield. He braces for the next shot, but it’s not enough; he’s thrown backwards, shield flying from his hand. He slips from Steve’s sight like smoke through his fingers.

Steve screams his name, gets to his feet. The HYDRA guard doesn’t stand a chance, his cumbersome weapon too unwieldy; he goes down from a single hit with shield, neck broken from the force of Steve’s throw.

He rips off his helmet, rushing to the gaping hole in the side of the train. At first, he thinks Bucky’s gone, and icy grief shoots through him. But Bucky calls his name from where he clings to the side of the train, barely hanging onto the iron grips on the side of the compartment. His pale eyes are wide.

“ _Hang on_!” Steve shouts, climbing out to him. He doesn’t think, barely looks where he’s stepping. He just has to get to Bucky, he _has_ to, there’s no way that this is how it ends. He stretches his hand out, so close. “ _Grab my hand_!”

The iron groans; Bucky lunges. Even through his gloves, Steve feels the air move between them.

The world is full of silent echoes; Steve’s roar of rage, Bucky’s wail of anguish. The air howls with it, nipping harshly at Steve’s ears, cold and biting. Bucky passes beyond even Steve’s keen vision, becoming nothing but a speck against the snow as he falls.

This is a nightmare.

_Wake up._

He’ll wake up in the tent, Bucky next to him, smelling of sleep and morning breath. They’ll rise together, drink awful coffee, eat disgusting K-rations, listen to Gabe and Dernier bicker. They’ll be together. Bucky’ll tell a dirty joke and Steve’ll laugh.

Wake up, wake up, wake _up_!

His mouth tastes like blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> from the bottom of my heart: oops


	26. 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mourning and planning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a short one.  
> also: PART ONE OF A TRIPLE UPDATE, 'cus I'm impatient and wanna share.
> 
> Warnings: I cried.

Peggy’s the one to find him in the rubble of what was once Ye Olde Mayflower.

While the Howlies had been scaling a mountain, London had been bombed again, leaving several buildings ruined beyond repair, hundreds of lives lost, and more than a thousand people wounded. The city will bounce back; it’s resilient like that. But the scars remain.

The journey back from Austria—with the captured Zola in tow—is fuzzy in Steve’s mind, as if he’d only just blinked and suddenly they were back in London, but it’s been a week, at least. He’s hungry, but he’s also nauseous. When was the last time he ate? Slept? The air smells like smoke and snow and dust. It coats his lungs, but that kind of thing doesn’t bother him anymore.  

They’d come back, they’d handed over Zola, they’d made their report. Steve’d started writing the condolence letter to Winifred Barnes, but his scribbles were nearly unintelligible. Dum Dum’d tried to persuade him to let him do it instead; there’s a broken table back at headquarters now. What platitudes can soothe this hurt; what words can describe this loss? Bucky was the Barnes’ only boy, the good, strong son, the one who did everything he ever could whenever they needed him to—and even when they didn’t, even when they pleaded with him to think of himself first, for once.

The Mayflower’s basement hadn’t been quite as damaged as the rest of the pub, and several bottles of liquor had been left whole in the aftermath. Steve dug them all out when he got here a few hours ago; there’s just one left now. The others lie scattered, some broken where he hurled them against the half-gone walls. He can’t feel anything, no bliss, no daze. Ever been so alone that the air seems to vibrate with emptiness and it feels as if a million eyes are upon you? When your nightmares seep into the real world, taking shape at the edges of your vision, until suddenly they perch at the foot of your bed, slowly crawling towards you? Sleep isn’t worth it; neither is being awake.

He’s kept company by one of the smaller, portable SSR radios. “…. blackout is still in effect throughout the London area. Please wait for the all-clear… your attention, please. All citizens shall remain indoors until further notice…” Has the world really ended if you don’t look outside? If you refuse to acknowledge it, can it rebuild itself while you’re away?

Peggy’s not trying to be quiet, so he hears her coming from down the street. He lets her clamber over the rubble without turning to help, too busy tossing back his head and pouring useless, alcohol-flavored water down his throat. When she comes to a stop by his shoulder, he lowers the bottle long enough to say, “I can’t get drunk. Did you know that?” He sounds like he’s been gargling gravel.

Peggy nods. “Your metabolism burns four times faster than the average person. Dr. Erskine did think this might be one of the side effects, what with the regenerative and healing effects of the serum on your cells.” She puts her hand carefully on his shoulder, squeezes. “I’m so terribly sorry for your loss. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Did you read the reports? Then you know that’s not true.” One soldier left alive. Just one man and Steve missed him, just one time that Bucky wasn’t watching his six with his rifle. And all the angels of Heaven had stood by and watched while their equal fell. He should’ve never asked Bucky to come, should’ve let the army send him home after Azzano. _Selfish_. _Foolish. Blind._

“You did everything you could,” Peggy says firmly, but there’s a faint note of sadness in her voice, too. “Did you believe in Sergeant Barnes? Did you respect him? Then stop blaming yourself. Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice to follow you. He damn well must have thought you were worth it.”

Steve leans back, breathes in slowly. He’s crying again; he’s _been_ crying, of course he has, but it’s not yet been the sort of crying that he’s consciously aware of. It’s like his body just leaks pain; he’ll touch his cheek and it’s wet, but he hasn’t put any real effort into it. Doesn’t have the energy for it. Can’t even mourn properly.

They sit together, quietly ignoring the long-passed curfew and the admonishments on the radio. Peggy doesn’t comment as Steve empties the bottle and lets it drop from his fingertips. Something burns inside of him, self-hatred and doubt and rage and sorrow and a hundred other things he can never put words to. He doesn’t deserve to sit here, doesn’t deserve the gentle words and gestures that the Howlies offered gladly.

Speaking of the Howlies, Peggy says, “They’re looking for you, you know. Your men worry.”

“I loved him.”

Peggy freezes, blinking like she’s not quite sure she heard him right. “Pardon?”

“I loved him. Not like a best friend, but like I’m supposed to love you. I always have.”

You could hear a pin drop in the silence that follow. Steve waits for her disgust, for her anger, for anything that’ll carve grooves in his skin and leave scars that’ll never heal. Anything that’ll make him _feel_. Maybe she’ll turn him in to their commanders; maybe she’ll just leave him forever.  

She works her jaw slowly, takes steady breaths. “I know what you’re doing, and I won’t let you.” A few tears trickle from her eyes, and she wipes them away jerkily, angrily. “Steve, God damn it. I’m so… so sorry.”

“Why?”

“Steven Rogers, do _not_ take that tone with me. You want to be punished? Go find someone else. I will not be party to it.”

“You don’t care that I hurt you?”

She closes her eyes, pain etched at the corners of her lips. “This is neither the time, nor the place for a bruised heart. Besides, it seems like you’ve got that covered already.” A sniffle follows. She sits up straight and clears her throat. “Did he know?”

“No. He didn’t love me like that.” _My name is James, we’ll be the bestest friends. Stevie! I’m with you ‘til the end of the line. To the future. Don’t do anything stupid ‘til I get back. Steve? Steve! Just like that. Let your taste be my last, then. I had him on the ropes._ He finally looks up, watches the fire in Peggy’s eyes burn brightly, sadness and hurt and an iron will to go on. “I’m goin’ after Schmidt. I’m not gonna stop ‘til all of HYDRA’s dead and buried.” He never wanted to kill anyone, back in Brooklyn. That boy is gone. Maybe, the act won’t leave a stain on him now; it’ll just cleanse him of his sins.

And Peggy, bright, beautiful Peggy with her sharp eyes and keen mind, doesn’t tell him not to waste away in anger, to rest, to wait for his mind to clear. She’s more like him—or maybe he’s more like her—than he’d been able to see before. “You won’t be alone. Now go to your men; they grieve for him, too.”

*

The unofficial memorial service for James Buchanan Barnes is small, quiet, and nothing like what he deserves. Once more, Dum Dum acts the officiate, saying the funeral prayer over Bucky’s old trunk that’ll be shipping back to his folks in the morning. There’s a photograph of Steve in there, of the two of them on Bucky’s last day in New York, his last day ever at home. There’s no body, no grave, no headstone. The resting place of James Barnes’ memory will be an empty grave, an empty chair at the dinner table, an empty bed next to Steve’s. His headstone will be placed next to those of his grandparents, shiny and new and much too soon. _Here lies the body of the best of men._  

The men who called Bucky their friend are all pale and hoarse as they say their goodbyes. Dum Dum bullies Steve into a long hug that he can’t bear to return; the others see him struggle and pile on, too. _You’re not alone_ , their touch says. _We loved him, too_.

While Steve has been drinking the town dry, Colonel Phillips has been busy. After a few hours of interrogating Zola—and promising him immunity; Steve’d nearly went ballistic at that—the small, oily man has finally given them something.

“Johann Schmidt belongs in a bug house. He thinks he’s akin to God, and he’s willing to blow up half the world to prove it, starting with the good ol’ USA,” Phillips reiterates. There are a lot more people present for this debrief than there had been last time. The Howlies won’t stand alone.

Stark is there, too. He doesn’t look nearly as sleek as he usually does, like he, too, has finally been touched by the reality of war. He hasn’t offered his condolences, and Steve’s glad for it. He might have decked him if he tried; Bucky isn’t Stark’s to mourn. “He’s working with powers beyond our capabilities. If he gets across the Atlantic with these things, he _will_ wipe out the entire eastern seaboard in less than an hour, and there’s nothing we can do to counter it.”

“How much time we got?” Gabe asks, perched over the report containing Zola’s testimony. A hand-drawn floor plan rests within, along with a few notes here and there on the defensibility of the area, half in German.

“According to my new best friend, Schmidt’s flying out in a little less than twenty-four hours, so we’ll need to be airdropped, as well.”

“Where is he now?” Dernier asks. His accent has softened so much over the last year, now he just sounds like he’s from the Bayou down in New Orleans, or so Gabe says.

Phillips turns to a grand war map hung on the wall, filled with pins marking the Howlies’ trek across Europe in search of HYDRA bases. “Their last stronghold lies here, in the Alps. Five hundred feet below the surface, it’s more a bunker than anything. Largely used for storage, then became a bolt hole for the last heads of HYDRA.”

Jim, too, has been looking at the floor plan over Gabe’s shoulder. “What’s the plan? I mean, it’s not like we can just knock on the front door?”

“Why not?”

Everybody in the room turn to Steve; some even tiptoe to get a proper look at him. No words are needed, their faces say it plainly: _are you out of your fucking mind?_ Maybe.

“You want to elaborate on that, son?” Phillips says in a _you_ better _elaborate on that, boy_ kind of tone _._

Steve shrugs. It’ll be dangerous, but who cares. He notes the narrowed stares thrown his way by each of the Howlies, knows that they know what he’s thinking and they’re _not_ happy about it. “’S worked before. They didn’t expect it then, and they won’t expect it now, so that’s exactly what we’re gonna do. All we need is a distraction.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *macarenas sadly*


	27. 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the last battle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PART TWO OF THE TRIPLE UPDATE
> 
> Warnings: so. y'all know that steve goes down with the plane. the way i'm seeing it, it might not be actively suicidal or accurately passively, but it's pretty damn close, and that's how i try to depict it. just so you know that that'll be coming across.

Apparently, Steve blazing through their gates on his motorcycle makes all the HYDRA soldiers stupid with eagerness.

He blows in, all on his lonesome, taking down as many men as he can. It could be luck or it could be the sheer amount of viciousness that Steve works them over with, but the HYDRA soldiers don’t think to look for his back-up—which is good, because there’s a whole contingent of soldiers waiting in the woods, though the more dangerous ones aren’t coming from there; the Howlies’ will be coming from the west, will be attaching their ziplines while all eyes are on Steve. He sacrifices another motorbike to the fight, another one of Stark’s tricked-out rides. It blows up beautifully.

Finally, they manage to pin him by using a couple of flamethrowers. Which: really? Why the hell do they have flamethrowers just lying around? Those don’t really seem suitable for war, but maybe that’s just Steve. They strip him of his shield and his weapons and lead him into the mouth of the beast.

Schmidt’s inner sanctum is a cavernous space with minimal furniture and comforts. It’s a waste of space, in Steve’s opinion; they could have fitted his and Bucky’s apartment in it ten times over, but the only significant thing there is a large desk. The room is lit by a single, giant window, allowing for an astounding view out into the wild.

Schmidt himself draws the eye first, however. He stands tall, casually dressed almost, his red, porous head cocked at Steve as he’s frogmarched in. His nose is particularly ghastly to behold, as if some of the cartilage has fallen away since the last time Steve saw him, and now it’s just a sunken pit in the middle of his face. “Arrogance may not be a uniquely American trait, but I must say you do it better than anyone,” he observes calmly, only slightly perturbed by it all. He walks towards Steve with the ease of a man certain of his own success. “But there are limits to what even you can do, Captain, despite all this. Or did Erskine tell you otherwise?”

Steve steadfastly doesn’t look towards the window. “He told me you were deranged.”

Schmidt scoffs and yet looks slightly disappointed by this news, as if he’d really thought that Erskine had found something to admire about him. “He resented my genius and tried to deny me what was rightfully mine. And yet, he gave you everything. So… what made you so special, so worthy of rebirth?”

“Nothin’,” Steve drawls. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.” Bucky would have killed him for the theatrics, and the thought makes Steve bare his teeth in a manic grin.

The hit is swift and brutal, sending Steve to his knees. If it weren’t for the serum, he’d have lost a tooth. Schmidt follows it with a brutal kick, forcing Steve to curl up, coughing up blood. It mists the air in front of him.

“I can do this all day,” he spits.

“Oh, of course you can,” Schmidt sighs, rolling his eyes. It’s really nasty to watch, the whites and veins showing that much more clearly than on an ordinary man. Behind him, dots of black are approaching from the west. “Of course. But unfortunately, I am on a tight schedule.”

“What a coincidence, so am I.”

The Howlies burst through the window, landing on their feet and firing. Schmidt, by far the smartest of them all, runs like the hounds of hell are on his heels, stealing away in the kerfuffle that ensues. Monty snatches Steve’s shield from one of his guards, throws it to him, and sends him off with assurances that they’ve got his back.

The SSR will be moving in by now, but Steve doesn’t stop to wait for them. Schmidt is all that matters now.

He gains on him as he sprints down a long, long hallway. As he passes through a doorway, he slams a button, and the big, reinforced double doors start sliding shut; Steve has to throw his shield to keep them open just enough for him to squeeze through.

Before he can reach them, however, he feels the heat of fire on his back, and throws himself down. Another HYDRA soldier has emerged from a side door, armed with one of those damn flamethrowers from the courtyard. Shit, Steve didn’t pick up a gun. _Fuck._

While he plays keep away with the fire, Peggy comes up behind the soldier, a Tommy gun resting comfortably in her hands. Two shots, and the soldier’s down. She marches forward fearlessly, stepping over the fallen man like he’s nothing but dog shit in the street.

“Get moving, Rogers,” she tells him, throwing him one of her handguns.

Steve grins and hurries on, snatching the shield from between the doors.

The hallway leads to a large hangar, where a plane that looks like nothing Steve has ever seen before is starting down the runway. He battles his way through the HYDRA soldiers milling about, but neither God nor the Devil could make him get there faster, and by the time backup arrives to help him out, the plane is gaining speed and even he can’t outrun it.

The roar of an engine rises behind him. When he turns, a large, fancy car skids to a stop next to him, Colonel Phillips in the driver’s seat and Peggy in the back. It’s almost offensively ugly. “Don’t just stand there, soldier, get in!”

Ugly it may be, but the engine is truly worth its salt, and they gain steadily on the aircraft. Due to the location of the bunker, the runway is incredibly long, needing to go all the way under the mountain to reach the other side. They come up from behind just as the plane’s starting to lift off.

He has to jump for it; there’s no other way. This occurs to Peggy at the exact same moment, and her nails briefly dig into his arm as a clumsy, hurried kiss is pressed to his cheek. She shrugs a little helplessly at him, cheeks flushed, hair all askew and waving in the wind. “Go get him.”

He looks to Phillips, too, slightly at a loss. “I’m not kissin’ ya!”  

With that remark ringing in his ears and choking back a laugh at the absurdity of it all, Steve leaps.

*

Onboard, it’s silent and strangely freezing.

Steve’s crawled into the cabin through a shallow vent near the wheels, a thoroughly unpleasant experience that makes him glad he didn’t have to go through the fox dens back in the field. The aircraft is so enormous, it has more than enough storage space for a number of smaller, pod-like planes—wait. Those aren’t pods. _Boston_ , one reads. _Chicago. New York._ These are the bombs—Christ, they’re humongous, nearly as wide as he is tall.  

Footsteps from above. He crouches low; on the catwalks, a few HYDRA soldiers scuttle around, their number made up of the few who’d managed to make it on the plane along with Schmidt. They’re only lightly armed, and Steve takes them down easy, pistol-whipping one, stealing another’s knife and cutting him down with it. He’s not as proficient with knives as Monty or Bucky, but he gets the job done.

Schmidt is waiting for him in the cockpit, another oversize area on this mutant of an aircraft. Behind him, in the middle of the room, is a strange contraption, reaching to about waist-height. It’s closed around something, something that glows with an eerie, cold blue light. Could this be the energy source, that cube thing HYDRA is so keen on?

“You don’t give up, do you?” Schmidt asks, almost pitying.

“Nope!”

They come together in a mess of limbs. Leaving all his soldier’s training behind him, Steve fights like Peggy taught him, brawls like he had back in Brooklyn, as light on his feet as Bucky in the boxing ring. There are no elegant punches, no choreographed push and pull. Steve hits with all that he’s got, punches for the Howlies who were held captive, kicks for the people who have died, headbutts for Peggy, jabs for Erskine, and most of all, he persists for Bucky.

His nose is bleeding freely, but it’s already snapped back in place. Schmidt tears the shield from him and slams it into his face again. They have to grapple for it. It sends them stumbling towards the controller board, past the glowing cube. Steve grabs Schmidt by the neck and slams his face into the yoke.

It’s a fucking stupid move. The yoke isn’t locked in place, so the plane nosedives at once, sending both men crashing into the front windows first, then falling upwards as the machine gains speeds and dives, dives, dives. Steve claws at Schmidt the second he’s within range and is slapped across the face for his trouble.

Schmidt uses the brief respite to make his way to the front and rights their course. Steve slams heavily against the floor as the plane levels out, groaning. A few of his ribs feel bruised, and his left knee is swollen. When he looks up, Schmidt has a gun aimed at his face, nothing fancy, just a Walter. It’ll do enough damage at this distance.

“You could have the power of the gods!” he yells, spittle flying. “All you need to do is to submit, and yet you wear that flag on your chest and think you fight the battle of nations, that you fight for the power of good! I have seen the future, Captain, and there are no flags—no pitiful, fallible, human rulers.”

Steve spits blood at him. The shield isn’t too far away, so he lunges, dodges a shot from the gun, then hurls the shield at Schmidt’s chest. It hits him with such force that the air nearly stutters with the crack of his ribs, and he slams against the contraption protecting the cube.

The latch holding the upper parts together breaks upon impact, and a glowing, fist-sized square tumbles to the floor. Wherever it lands, the iron floor seems to dissolve, burns spreading quickly. Schmidt yells and lurches forward to seize it.

“What have you done!” he shrieks at Steve, cupping the cube gently in his hands.

At once, the air changes. First, it gets even colder, frost crawling up the walls; then, the ice melts quickly as the temperature rises, and the cube seems to… move? It’s so bright Steve can barely look at it, has to shield his eyes. Deliriously, he thinks he sees the stars, the Milky Way, a hundred suns in worlds far away, until it all disappears, and Schmidt starts sobbing.

The cube seems a living thing; tendrils of eerie light crawl up Schmidt’s arm, stripping clothes and flesh as they go. When they reach his face, Steve has to look away; the smell of it alone… The moaning is abruptly cut off, and Schmidt is gone. The small, innocuous square sits quietly on the floor, sinking slowly as the iron burns away.

Steve rushes forward, but doesn’t dare grab it, and thus has to just watch as it falls all the way through the hull and into the sea far below.

Getting to his feet, he hurries to the yoke and control boards, tries to make sense of what he sees down below. He’s somewhere near the arctic, maybe? Zola didn’t exactly offer up a flight plan, but such a course seems a bit strange to Steve. But what does he know; he’s never flown a plane, doesn’t know how—he barely knows how to drive a car. Monty had tried to teach him, but only the motorcycle really felt right.

At that moment, alarms start ringing. In the storage area, red lights flash ominously above the bombs. Steve’s sweating so much that he feels his helmet sliding forward— _shit_.  That SSR agent had said the cube functioned as a stabilizing force, and the aircraft had been unnaturally cold when he boarded. Now, the temperature is rising.

Back at the control panel, Steve searches frantically for the radio. And aircraft like this has got to have—there. His hands shake, but his mind is quiet. It’d be a good time to pray. “This is Captain Rogers,” he says into the microphone. “Come in. Do you read me? Over.”

Static meets him. Then a voice; a familiar California drawl. “Captain! What is your—”

More static, as if he’s dropped the radio, then another voice. “Steve! Are you alright?”

_Peggy_. “Schmidt’s dead. I’m alive, I lost the cube. Peggy, the bombs…”

“Steve?” her voice shakes, it’s not just his imagination.

“There’s no failsafe up here, I can’t keep them contained.”

“Then you get out, Rogers, there has to be a, a parachute or something, point the nose up, just pull the stick back towards you, and then _get out_. Give me your coordinates, we’ll come find you.”

Steve looks around. There are no parachutes in sight, but he’d spotted an emergency exit in the storage area. Outside, a wide stretch of frozen land is coming up. But he’s so high up, even his extraordinary body won’t survive hitting the water at this altitude… will it?

In that moment, Steve sees his life as crystal clear as if he’d already lived the future. He’ll go home, he’ll make a real effort at being an ordinary man, he’ll have the Howlies and their wives and kids over for Sunday dinner, he’ll fall in love with Peggy, have children, and live to be old and grey.

But he’ll always be looking over his shoulder, waiting for a ghost. Will see the house next door and know it isn’t inhabited by a tall, handsome man with pale eyes and a wicked grin. He’ll face the Barnes’ and tell them that their son was inches from his fingertips, but it wasn’t enough. He’ll face _himself_ and live a haunted life.

Slowly, or maybe it’s quickly, a decision takes shape. The bombs need the cold to remain stable; what’s colder than the icy waters below? He’s survived getting shot, getting stabbed, crashing his motorbike, jumping through fire. He might… he might live, if he puts the plane down, despite hitting the ground hard. He might die.

“I have to put her down,” he says into the radio, voice steady. _God, if I live, I swear, I’ll live life to the fullest. I’ll take care of my friends, I’ll stand by their side, I’ll be honest and kind and strong, I’ll not hate myself for falling in love with Peggy, I’ll honor Bucky’s memory. If not… I’m coming home now. I’ll see him again, see my Ma and my father, and I’ll be alright._

Another scramble sounds on the other end, until Monty’s voice rings through. “Don’t you fucking dare, Rogers,” he hisses, mutters of echoing him in the background. “You turn her nose up, and you get out!”

“There’s no parachute, and I can neutralize the bombs, I just gotta put her in the water.”

“That was an order, Captain, and you better fucking follow it. I outrank you, you noble twat!”

“I’ll get Howard on the line, he’ll know what to do,” Peggy chimes in, pushing towards the radio. “Just give me your coordinates. Please, Steve… don’t do this. He wouldn’t have wanted you to.”

His heart twists. That’s low. “There’s no time. Right now, I’m in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer, a lot of people could die.” He fumbles with his compass, puts it on the dash, flips open. Peggy’s face greets him; a false declaration to the one he could’ve loved if only his heart hadn’t beat for another. He should’ve carried those Expo pictures around like Bucky had, should’ve treasured them more. “Peggy, this is my choice. Didn’t you say there was dignity in that?”

He’s already forcing the yoke forward. The plane tips down eagerly and his belly gives a lurch like it’d done on the Cyclone. He can almost hear Bucky’s wild laughter, like he’s standing right beside him, lit up by carnival light. But there’s no one. He doesn’t want to be alone.

He must have said that last part out loud, or maybe Peggy’s just intuitive. “I’m here, Steve. We’re all here.”

He nods though no one can see it. If he lives… “I’m gonna need a raincheck on that dance.” It’s the least he can do, for all the hurt he’s caused her.

“Alright,” Peggy offers quickly. Someone sobs out a laugh on the other end, desperate. He thinks Gabe might be cursing him in French. “In a week. Next Saturday, at the Stork Club. Eight o’clock on the dot, don’t you dare be late. Understood?”

“You’re gonna have to lead,” he tells her. He’s never been so scared and yet so calm.

“It’s alright. Just be there.”

“We’ll have them play something slow, just so I won’t step on your—”

The water rises up.  

*

Everything hurts. It’s so cold. He’s wet; he’s sinking. He can’t breathe. The alarms still shriek shrilly, until suddenly they stop. The world is down. The world is up. There’s water in his lungs. He can’t move his arms or legs, they’re too heavy. It’s so cold.  

Everything is bright, and he exhales one last time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> read on for the last part of the triple update  
> also: SORRY


	28. 28: Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> meanwhile, in an undisclosed location...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i got cussed at for this chapter  
> last part of the triple update
> 
> warnings: torture, some refs to steve's crash and the reasons surrounding it

In the bowels of a seemingly bottom-less pit that might as well be on the moon, a dirty, broken shell of a soldier is curled up in a corner, shivering. Eyes like the winter sky are alive with fury and confusion, peering out from underneath matted, unwashed hair. He hasn't had a good, thorough cleaning in months, has only been doused with whatever small amount of water one can fit in a bucket. They throw it on him as if he were a mangy street cur, darkening the doorsteps of a classy, uptown family.

His left arm is missing almost all the way up to the shoulder, and the edges of the stump is in the process of decay. It stinks to high heaven, but there’s no infection in sight.

He has no name, or at least not one that he remembers. Something childish, he thinks, something that starts with a plosive noise, something that even children can stutter. Sometimes, it seems like a disembodied voice calls it out, first high and clear and laced with a cough, then later deep and pleasant, a soft baritone. A boy with hair like sunshine, a small man growing grotesquely big right before his eyes. He knows his name, sometimes. He knows his taste, always.

Footsteps approach. His captors study him.

A newspaper is thrown into the cell, the headline declaring: CAPTAIN AMERICA DEAD: A NATION MOURNS.

He doesn't understand it at first, can't connect the dots. The man in his mind's eyes shrinks and grows, laughs and coughs, yells and moans. He tastes like whiskey, like morning, like warmth. The sunshine man's name is Steve.

"No…" the prisoner protests as the memory solidifies. "No!"

They drag him kicking and screaming to the small chamber that serves as the laboratory. In the middle is a chair. He hates the chair, hates it, it scares him, please, no, _please_ , _Steve_.

They play back a recording while they strap him in; a number of voices, but mostly that familiar soft, timbre and a woman. He knows them, knows them _all_ , but only the one is truly important. That voice claims that there's no time. He has to go down with the plane. He promises to take the woman for a dance. The once-soldier knows the speaker is lying, can tell from the way it grows too level when claiming that there’s no other way.  

The man on the tape has made his choice and the ground is rising to meet him.

Steve has given up.

The tape stutters to a stop, the connection cutting out.

They play it again.

The straps are painful, digging into his skin. The once-soldier struggles, screams, cries, calls out the name that grows fainter in his mind by the second. The machine beneath him hums, crackling with electricity. It hurts, it hurts _so much_ , it'll never stop.

His skin is smoking; he can smell it. It makes him sick, but he can't stop calling out, has to keep going, _please_ , Steve, don’t.

When the tape begins for the thirteenth time, the man who was Bucky Barnes breaks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY  
> one chapter left y'all, dunno how the fuck i did this


	29. 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve wakes up to a whole new world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SURPRISE MOTHERHUGGERS, IT'S FINISHED  
> if you've made it this far, i salute you. thank you all so much for the comments and kudos, i've adored sharing this with you and i'm always ready to answer any questions you might have in the comments.  
> this chapter is a little sad, too, but i feel like it ends on a note of cautious optimism (or... at least not pessimism).  
> Any updates henceforth made to this fic will SOLELY be me editing grammatical or spelling errors, 'cus i am absolutely nitpicky like that, but the adventure continues in a new fic based on The Avengers, the next part of this series.
> 
> once again, a thousand hugs and kisses to you for sticking with me through this!

“… curve ball, high and outside for ball one. So, the Dodgers are tied, 4-4. And the crowd well knows that with one swing of his bat, this fellow’s capable of making it a brand-new game again. Just an absolutely gorgeous day here at Ebbets Field. The Phillies have managed to tie up at 4-4. But the Dodgers have three men on. Pearson beaned Reiser in Philadelphia last month. Wouldn’t the youngster like a hit here to return the favor? Pete leans in. Here’s the pitch. Swung on. A line to the right. And it gets past Rizzo. Three runs will score. Reiser heads to third. Durocher’s going to wave him in. Here comes the relay, but they won’t get him…”

Steve opens his eyes slowly to what has got to be a dream, and if it isn’t, then Heaven really needs a new theme. He’s in a sunny hospital room, window upon to let in the sounds of New York City, mixing with the baseball game on the radio. Everything is tranquil and clean.

So why are his hackles rising?

Steve’s been in the hospital before— _plenty_ of times. He knows the standards of cleanliness, of order. But this isn’t it. It’s too… neat, almost. Like nothing’s ever been touched except for the bed he’s occupying. There are no scuffmarks on the floor, no smell of cleaning fluids or antiseptic. Even the echoes are wrong; like the traffic outside is static. The wind that stirs the curtains smells too fresh. And the game playing… wait.

He sits up slowly, takes stock of himself. Nothing hurts, nothing aches, but he’s definitely alive. His body feels a little heavy and slow, but going down with a plane will do that to you, he supposees. The last thing he remembers is the freezing water and the cut-off sound of the alarms. He’s sporting a short-sleeved SSR shirt and slightly crinkled, beige pants. When he touches his hair, it’s neatly combed.

What the _fuck_.

Just as he’s starting to really freak out, the door opens and a woman steps in. His relief is short-lived; she, too, is all wrong. She looks like an administrative officer, if such a dame had been put together by an artist who’d never seen someone like that and only had eyewitness accounts to go on. In fact, the artist might never have seen a working woman before; her brown hair is long, impractical for a hospital and too casual for army regulations. Her red lipstick is almost plummy, too daring for respectable dames. Her tie is too wide, a man’s tie, and what the hell is going on with her chest region? Could be the bad fit of the shirt, but Steve’s certain it’s more than that; he’s spent more than enough time around chorus girls to know the general shape of their bosoms despite doing his best not to look.

“Good morning,” she tells him with a smile, voice like velvet. The watch on her left arm is clunky. “Or should I say, afternoon?”

Steve’s mouth is dry, and his nerves are shot. “Where am I?”

“You’re in a recovery room in New York City,” she tells him gently. She doesn’t sound like any New Yorker that he’s ever heard, not even those classy dames from Manhattan. Her speech is totally devoid of an accent, much the same as Brandt’s people had tried to encourage Steve’s to be.

“… the Dodgers take the lead, 8-4. Oh, Dodgers! Everyone is on their feet. What a game we have here today, folks. What a game indeed!” the radio announcer cheers. If Steve blinks, he can almost taste the fatty sausages and salty popcorn, the cheap beer that Bucky’d shelled out for. Feels the sweat on their skin and the joy in their hearts as the Dodgers showed everyone who’s boss.

He sets his jaws, keeps calm. “Where am I really?”

She frowns, lips curving down in a moue of worry. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

He nods towards the radio. “That game. It’s from May, 1941. I know, ‘cause I was there.” He rises, unfurling slowly until he towers half a foot above the woman, until her face falls and she slips into a casual fighting stance. Is she HYDRA? Did he fail after all? “Now, I’m gonna ask you again: Where. Am. I?”

There’s something in her hand. “Captain Rogers…” she tries to soothe.

“ _Who are you?_ ”

Two men rush in, all dressed in black, uniforms unfamiliar. Steve plants his feet, glances from one to the other. The only way out is the door—or the windows, but he’s not risking that.

Whoever they are, they must have been ill-prepared for him, for he catches them by their collars easily. He doesn’t care to kill them, only wants to _get out_ , so he just throws them against the door. To his surprise, the wall goes down with them, the structure so frail and—

He’s on a movie set. That’s the only thing this can be, what with the plain white walls and the painted screens of a static New York City. Undaunted, he sprints for the door ahead, ignoring the woman calling him back, telling him to calm down.

He exits into a wide hallway, filled with suited people. None of them seem to be in a hurry, but they start into action the second they spot him. Steve muscles his way out of there, running wild with desperation, bumping into several and just leaving them where they fall.

Somehow, he finds his way out, emerging onto a street that is both familiar and not. It’s like someone took a New York avenue and slapped more concrete and glass on it. The cars aren’t as boxy, and there are way more of them. More _people_ , too, some oddly dressed. He runs.

In a large square not too far from where he was held, he skids to a stop, heart pounding. Is he seeing things? Is this hell? Giant tv screens light up the space, frenzied, colorful advertisements for things he’s never even heard of. They cage him in from every side, forcibly bidding him to buy clothes from Urban Outfitters, to trust in the Bank of America, to go see the Lion King on Broadway. He’s going to throw up, what the hell is going on, where is he, what’s—

Big, black, stocky cars roll up, surrounding him. Black clad agents pour out. Steve spins to keep an eye on them all; they aren’t yet pointing their weapons at him, but they are clearly armed, handguns, a few batons.

“At ease, soldier!”

A tall black man in black parts the crowd of agents easily, his stride confident and easy. He’s bald but has a short, trim beard just around his mouth, and a severe countenance despite the wry smile on his face. He wears an eyepatch over his left eye. The others defer to him, so Steve focuses on him, too, easing into a fighting stance to meet him. It plainly amuses the stranger.

“I’m sorry about that little show back there, but… we thought it best to break it to you slowly,” the man tells him, not an ounce of apology in either tone or gaze. His voice is deep, his articulation crisp.

Steve’s poor heart is close to giving out. “Break what?” he asks, starting to think he doesn’t actually want to know the answer.

Something like compassion flickers across the stranger’s face. “My name is Director Nick Fury, of S.H.I.E.L.D. We’ve been taking care of you. You’ve been asleep, Cap. For almost seventy years.”

His first instinct is to call Fury a goddamned liar, but the truth is all around him. The world spins, but Steve is frozen. _God, no, this isn’t what I meant._ Seventy years? His friends will be… if they’re even alive, they’ll be in their nineties—some of them will be _dead._ And the Barneses… Winifred and George must be long gone by now, he never got to say he’s sorry, never got to beg their forgiveness, and Peggy…

Is this God’s punishment for his reckless descent? Let him live, but take everything from him. It wasn’t enough that he lost Bucky, now there’s no one left at all. How can he keep his promise before God, when there’s no one left to honor it for?

“You gonna be okay there, soldier?” Director Fury asks—demands, more like.

_The fuck do you think_? He blinks rapidly. He doesn’t want this man—any of the agents, or the random people in the street—to see him lose it. Thus, he casts around for something to say, something flippant, something that’ll make them stop _looking at him_ , anything. His mind seizes on this last promise he made.

“Yeah. Yeah,” he lies. “I just… I was gonna go dancin’.”

*

Steve asks for just one thing.

Okay, he asks for a few things, but that comes later. Right now, he doesn’t even ask for anything, as such, it’s more that he’s freaking out and trying not to show it, so the question just spills from him while he’s in a car with Director Fury and trying not to touch anything. He’s being given the rundown of what happened to him—into the ice, frozen, serum endured, accidentally discovered by an arctic research team—he’s not really listening. “Senator Brandt was gonna take care of ou—my apartment, is it still…?”

“Howard Stark bought the building when he came back from the war,” Fury informs him, watching Steve closely. “Kept everything as it was, even in the other apartments when the people living there moved. Upkeep fell to his son when he died. In the nineties, Stark Junior entrusted it to an organization called the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, who branched out their repertoire just for that, so it’s part of their permanent exhibition now.”

“It’s still…?”

“Just as it was.” Fury shrugs. “Well, almost. Some things are in other museums, but the furniture, some knickknacks, a few clothes, those are there—the latter are kept in garment bags, of course, to preserve them properly, but they’re still exhibited.”

Steve doesn’t ask, but they take him there anyway, perhaps eager to settle him after his freak out. It takes nearly half an hour to get there, and they pass beneath the river via a tunnel that wasn’t there in Steve’s youth—does he still count as a young man? He’s was few months from twenty-seven when he went down, frozen years can’t possible count, his mind didn’t age, neither did his body. He doesn’t feel much of anything, so he can’t say if he feels young or not.

The Red Hook tenement building that housed Bucky and Steve from 1939 and onwards looks nicer than it ever did back in the day. It’s cleanish, obviously well-maintained, with a little plaque that reads _New York Tenement Museum, Brooklyn Branch,_ and below a sign proclaims _Home of Captain America and Sergeant James ‘Bucky’ Barnes._ His stomach lurches worryingly.

Somehow or other, Fury manages to get the tour currently in process derailed, and Steve’s allowed to go on up to the fourth floor alone. The hallway doesn’t smell like it used too; there are no food scents lurking from behind each door, not questionable refuse left on the stairs. 

Passing through the faded green door is like passing into a memory.

Upon entering, you step straight into the small, cramped living room-slash-kitchen—if the latter can even truly be called that. It’s just a stove, a small countertop, and a sink against one wall. Everything is in shades of grey, brown, and a really ugly green, God, how had Bucky ever allowed that shade inside their home, it hadn’t looked that bad when Steve couldn’t differentiate between the different nuances. His ma’s red tablecloth still covers the slightly crooked dining table, and the flat, blueish pillows on the wobbly, yet amazingly soft, couch are Becca’s work.

To the right, facing west, is the bedroom. The top of Steve’s head barely clears the doorway when he walks in. The two shallow beds in here are barely a foot apart, made with linens that are obviously new, but quite similar to those that they’d used themselves. For a moment, the apartment is utterly strange, more like a broken dollhouse than anything comforting. It’s all carefully messy, like he or Bucky’d just walk in anytime while the tour guide showed strangers into their home.

His ears are ringing.

He strides to the tiny closet, opens it a bit more jerkily than the museum people would probably like. Two cheap suits hang in garment bags made of clear plastic, along with Bucky’s worn work boots, Steve’s house coat, and—

Roughly, Steve pulls out the bag containing the shirt Bucky’d always worn down at the docks. Unbelievably, unzipping the bag sends up a puff of scent; saltwater, sweat, and Bucky’s sharp cologne, perfectly preserved as if it’d only been waiting for Steve to find it. The material is so fragile between his fingers, the threads like spider’s silk. There’s a bit of oil on the cuff.

Steve’s on his knees, only realizing this when the thud of his knees hitting the floor splinters the silence. His lungs twist painfully just like they used to when summer air, winter air, _any_ air got too much for him to handle, and his nose is full of the smell of Bucky.

And for the first time, Steve Rogers lets go.

The sobs wreck him, leaving him gasping and shaking and coughing, the floodgates open wide. The tears are so manifold they sting his eyes, he feels sweaty and flushed and sick. They’re all gone, all the people he ever knew, or at least nearly so, if some linger still. The Howlies, Peggy, the Barneses, Arnie and his fella Sammy, the other tenement-dwellers, Colonel Phillips, and even the girls they’d stepped out with back before the war.

But most of all, Bucky’s never coming home. He _never_ came back.

It’s a long time before Steve can even start pulling himself together. Vaguely, he’s amazed that Fury doesn’t come crashing through the door, demanding that they get going. Even without a mirror, Steve knows how he looks right now; he was never a pretty crier, and he doubts the serum changed that. His skin will be fever-flushed, patches of red staining even his throat, chest, and shoulders. His lashes are clumped and wet, eyes pink and puffy. Even his mouth feels like it’s near to overflowing with spit.

He carefully puts the garment bag back in the closet but keeps the shirt in his hand. He doesn’t give a single damn for what the museum will say; this shirt is his now, it was Bucky’s, he would’ve wanted Steve to take it. He puts his shoulders back, clears his throat, pushes his hair out of his eyes, and leaves the apartment as he found it, taking nothing else. He can’t stand to be in there for a second longer.

Steve Rogers has a promise to keep.

For better or worse, he’s alive. He’s got to keep going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't say it enough: THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH
> 
> btw! The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is an actual museum that is so, so worth a visit if you ever find yourself in New York City. The guides are amazing, the experience is fantastic, and it really focuses on the immigrant experience that makes NYC such an interesting melting pot of people and cultures.


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